Like other martech outsiders, the big ad holding companies have bought customer data expertise: see Merkle/Dentsu, Acxiom/IPG, and Epsilon/Publicis. WPP’s Wunderman Thompson has plenty of customer data experience – the late Lester Wunderman coined the term “direct marketing” in 1967 – but they still aren’t building their own systems. Instead, they’ve just announced a deal to use Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP within their Customer Cloud platform.
Adobe is creating a new organization to expand its sales to small and mid-size business. The new unit will offer SMB-tailored versions of Magento, Marketo, Adobe Analytics, e-signature, and Creative Cloud. Adobe’s Magento acquisition in 2018 gave it a major foothold in the SMB market.
Winning this week’s Ne Plus Obvious Award (which I just invented), a Princeton University study that found internet-connected TVs track customer data. They found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire channels – and that lots of the data could be linked to specific individuals. Maybe that’s not literally obvious, since the notifications are well hidden, but if you’re surprised then you haven’t been paying attention.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.