Silicon Valley Bank collapses, generative AI’s big week, and mixed messages from Meta.
💼 Here’s the week in Martech:
Silicon Valley Bank: How the bank's collapse will affect Martech and Adtech
Generative AI’s big week: GPT- 4, Hubspot, China and Google
Mixed message from Meta: Another big layoff, closing down NFTs and a new social format
Everything else: Project Clover, Twilio and CX data, how people spend time online, LinkedIn is 20 years old, composable DXPs, affiliate commerce, and a menu for marketers.
📰 Latest Developments
Silicon Valley Bank. In interesting parallels to the GameStop saga of 2021, but in reverse, Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest US bank collapsed this week as Twitter influencers, group chats, and general media hysteria triggered a bank run off the back of a series of divestment announcements from the company. In a single day, $47 billion in deposits were transferred from the company and the stock price plummeted forcing the FDIC to keep startup entrepreneurs everywhere in suspense over an entire weekend as they work through how to guarantee depositors’ funds. A wide variety of Martech and Adtech companies and startups were impacted as the majority of companies building technology have strong ties to the financial and investing communities in Silicon Valley. The fallout of the bank run will impact the funding and VC ecosystem, which might lead to a downturn in new startup growth out of the region. But there’s an interesting story here about the role of social media cycles in pumping (GameStop, NFTs) and dumping (FTX, SVB) different types of companies in unique ways. If you know a startup founder in the Martech space you might want to give them a hug (or buy them a drink). It's been a big weekend. Links: FDIC statement. Matt Levine (Pt. 1 & Pt. 2), Martech impact.Advertising impact ($). Analysis. What happened?
Another big week for generative AI. The hype cycle continues to grow with the announcement of GPT-4. The next iteration of generative technologies powering breakout success apps like ChatGPT. The technology proposes to learn a user’s writing style, use advanced reasoning abilities, allows for image-based prompts, and can now pass more complex exams. There’s still no direct access to internet content and is locked by its training set (you have to go to Bing to see something that approaches GPT technology for the open web). In other news, Hubspot is following in the footsteps of Salesforce by announcing Chatspot, which is a generative AI toolset for CRM. China is mulling over making ChatGPT available to the country’s citizens – renewing censorship concerns. And Google is now moving past generative AI as a direct replacement for search products, announcing integration with Google Docs and Sheets. Links: GPT-4, use cases, Chatspot, China, Google Search,Google Docs.
Mixed messages from Meta. There’s a lot of news coming out of Meta right now as the company continues to shift out of its Metaverse era. The first is the company cutting another 10,000 jobs off the back of a similarly sized layoff towards the end of 2022, another signal that the company didn’t pick the right horse in 2021 with its metaverse strategy. The move also indicates slowing ad spending across its platform as Meta’s family of apps continues to age (but also grow its audience base). Meta this week also ended NFT and digital collectable support (another blow to the company’s metaverse ambitions) and is now working on a decentralized text-based social network that might have similarities to Mastodon or Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky. And it seems as though Meta’s going through another grudge match with how the company works with news media, instead this time it’s not Australia, it’s Canada. Links: Layoffs, NFTs, Decentralized social, Canada.
Retail media continues its extension. Criteo acquired Brandcrush this week, an Australian-based company that focuses on running ads in online and offline locations. Criteo sees it as an opportunity to bring both physical and online formats together. But there are a lot of challenges around this. Usually, in-store ad buyers are a different team from programmatic advertising or performance marketing, a natural silo not solved with tech (yet). Best Buy (A US home goods retailer) is building out capabilities to allow marketers to self-serve ads in another extension for major retailers building out their own ad platforms, ASOS the global fast fashion retailer is now getting into retail media also (expect more fashion retailers to jump into the fray). There can only be two explanations for all of these investments – the money’s there, or we’re all just following the crowd. Criteo, Best Buy, ASOS.
Project Clover. TikTok is working on closing off data transfers out of Europe on the app to satisfy GDPR requirements. TikTok is also doing this in the US, but the policies are more unified with the EU government and GDPR commission, so this might be more of a template for other countries to use. Link
Twilio and Qualtrics build and integration. This is an interesting one, because it brings both CX, advertising, and marketing data together into the Twilio-Segment CDP. Qualtrics is a market leader in qualitative customer feedback, so this integration has more value for the customer service folks than the marketers. Link
📈 Chart of The Week
How people spend time online. This extensive deep dive into tech and media trends from Activate Consulting looks at how consumers are spending their time online. Interestingly, most of the time is spent on video daily, which is likely a combination of streaming, YouTube, and social video apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels. Video really isn’t on the periphery of customer experience, it’s right in the center of it. Link
📚 Reading
Social media fragmentation. Good insights into how marketers are dealing with a fragmented ad market as Google and Meta’s dominance starts to fade. Link
An in-depth breakdown of the DOJ case against Google.Link
LinkedIn is 20 years old! This essay looks back at the improbability of the company. Link
Recommendation algorithms - an evil we need to live with?Link
CDP connectors – do they work? Are no-code data activation connectors useful? There are mixed results. Link
🔢 Data & Insights
75% of marketers rely on third-party cookies. I have a feeling that Google might want to delay cookie deprecation once again. But this does explain the gold rush dynamics of CDP, data clean rooms, retail media, and contextual. There’s still a large and increasingly addressable market for replacement solutions for targeted advertising on the web. Link
The value of UGC creators. Good insights into how allowing users to interact with each other onsite can create opportunities for media monetization and user growth. Link
Hyper personalization is popular. The concept of hyper-personalization overlaps with omnichannel quite a bit, where brands attempt to personalize content both in granularity but also with congruency across channels. A 2023 report from CleverTouch suggests that growth in hyper-personalization has increased significantly since last year. Link
Affiliate commerce. In the post-cookie situation, almost no one is thinking very much about the value of affiliate channels as an area for growth. This deep dive goes into the category and its link to retail media, and other forms of performance marketing. Link
Monolith to modular. The DXP is another category getting unbundled into a variety of apps that sit on top of a customer data warehouse. Links: Monoliths. MACH-based DXPs.
Sending messages without phone connectivity. A startup working on other ways to help phones connect with each other without the internet or cellular availability. Link
✨ Weird and Wonderful
Advertising’s role in supporting ethical journalism. The irony! Link
Weird subscription bundle. Do people who read the Wall Street Journal also need a mental health app? Apparently so. It would be easier to avoid bad news. Link
