CDP Institute

Customer engagement platform MessageGears will partner with content localization and translation platform Smartling to streamline email translation and localization for 450+ languages.  The workflow is automated but actual translations are still done by (machine-assisted) humans.

Utiq lets consumers manage consent on a website-by-website basis, drawing on internet connections provided by major European telcos.  This lets it provide a cookie-free, privacy-safe customer ID that covers many more people than IDs based on email address.  They just partnered with data provider All Eyes On Screens to improve addressability and provide real-time audience insights for TV advertisers in Germany.

A California judge has issued an injunction preventing WordPress and its co-founder Matt Mullenweg from blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress resources and interfering with WP Engine plugins. The conflict arose when Mullenweg blocked WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org servers after accusing WP Engine of misusing the WordPress trademark and requesting a share of its revenue. WordPress owner Automattic blamed WP Engine for making its business dependent on WordPress services.

Martech’s portion of the marketing budget is set to rise from 19% this year to 22.7% in next year, 31.7% in five years, according to the CMO Survey. This despite 54.9% seeing less payoff from martech use than expected. While almost 80% of companies use martech, it’s surprising that around 45% of marketing activities are martech free (are spreadsheets martech?).

While the CMO survey reports expectations of modest martech budget increases, marketing executives surveyed by Merkle are bullish about overall marketing budget hikes. This is based on an optimistic economic outlook (86% think that the economy will improve over the next 6-12 months). They are also seeing increased revenues (only 13% said revenue was flat or in decline).

ABM platform Demandbase highlights the increasing importance of B2B influencers (experts rather than celebrities) in reaching B2B buyers. It also says the days of manual ads are over with programmatic increasingly capable of reaching target accounts and audiences. Cross-channel campaigns are seen as critical, especially those leveraging LinkedIn and CTV.

Quora is enhancing its B2B advertising capabilities through a strategic partnership with B2B data platform Bombora. B2B targeting parameters (e.g. industry or company size) plus ABM targeting will help sellers reach buyers in the context of Quora’s question-and-answer content. The integration is already live for Quora advertisers.

Humans are good at creating low-quality websites but genAI leaves them in the dust.  Advertisers hoping to avoid junk websites can now turn to DoubleVerify, which has launched a GenAI Website Avoidance & Detection solution. Currently it can only monitor English-language content but there are plans to expand.

Maybe the U.S. government will ban TikTok and maybe it won’t.  In the meantime, the company continues to strengthen its ad business.  Latest move is joining Nielsen ONE audience engagement monitoring, which gives advertisers one screen to compare TikTok performance with digital, linear TV, CTV and other channels.

A federal appeals court has upheld the law that will soon ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese owner, Byte, sells its stake. TikTok has since moved for a temporary stop on the law to allow appropriate time for Supreme Court review. Members of TikTok’s vast creator community are beginning to redirect followers to platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

Retail media is about retailers selling ads like publishers, so you might think that publishers could tap into retail media budgets with no special effort.  Not so.  Adtech platform Perion is helping publishers to execute retail media-style campaigns by serving ads near store locations with dynamic, product-specific messages and real-time pricing updates.

Composable CDPs aren’t the only systems that can use enterprise data without copying it into a separate database.  At last week’s re:invent conference, AWS announced Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio will let customers access and manage enterprise data across data lakes and warehouses as well as applications. Also, SageMaker’s Zero ETL feature will run analytics directly on data within warehouses and lakes.