Reports emerged at the weekend that Salesforce was in advanced talks to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica. The deal would be Salesforce’s largest since acquiring Slack in 2021, and shares fell 7% Monday on the news. Informatica would add more advanced technical capabilities to the Salesforce product line.
A new record high for internet advertising revenue was reached in 2023: $225 billion, a 7.1% YoY increase according to a report compiled by PwC for the IAB. The big growth channels were retail media networks (16.3% YoY), video advertising (10.6%), with 42% of the growth generated by CTV/OTT, and audio advertising (18.9%). Search and display revenues remain high but show comparatively little growth.
Despite Adobe repeatedly stating that AI image generator Firefly was not trained on images scraped from the web, a report by Bloomberg states that some of the training data included AI-generated images from competitors like Midjourney. Adobe has said a relatively small amount of images from competitors — around 5% — was used. Given the amount of training data that must have been used, 5% is still a lot of images; and Adobe has millions of image assets of its own.
Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.