Rejecting shareholder demands that it divest Segment, Twilio announced a plan to continue selling it as a stand-alone product, integrate it more closely with its other offerings, increase growth, and cut costs. New layoffs are almost sure to follow, on top of a 25% company-wide staff reduction in the past two years. The company reports that Segment lost $72 million in 2023, despite 7% revenue growth to $295 million.
While advertisers continue to rely heavily on third-party cookies for programmatic ad buys, they are slowly preparing for the cookieless future. 33Across reports investment in cookie alternatives within its ad exchange grew an average of 9% in Q4 2023 compared with the previous quarter. Retail advertisers invested 26% of their budget in cookie alternatives during the period, more than double the share of one year ago.
Openprise, which now calls itself a Revenue Data Operations platform but qualifies as a CDP, has raised a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding to $58 million. Revenue Operations, if you haven’t been keeping up with your industry buzzwords, supports marketing, sales, and service organizations. This Openprise survey on the topic found just 9% of RevOps professionals were very satisfied with their data.
After years of thinking they were in the business of selling things to people, retailers have realized they’re actually in the business of selling people to advertisers. Retail media networks are the most obvious result, but why stop at ads sold directly by the retailer? Walmart has hooked up with Disney Advertising to test letting advertisers on Disney+, Hulu, and other Disney outlets use Walmart audience information to improve targeting and measure results.