News Analysis

Scott Galloway says big tech is about to get broken up, Bytedance will usurp Meta within two years and that at least one big streaming service will soon go pop. Meanwhile, he stands by last year's cheery prediction of the death of the CMO by 2025 and, alongside Galloway's keynote at ADMA's Global Forum, virtual professor Mark Ritson offered some clues as to why: Only a third know what marketing's foundational four Ps actually stand for, and just one in six know how to calculate return on ad spend, per a poll he conducted with ADMA. But Galloway offered some tips to CMOs looking to survive his oft-prophesied extinction event – and likewise for publishers now getting fleeced by large language models.

The stakes for Alphabet after losing its antitrust case this week are huge. If the judge in the case unplugs the distribution deal between Google and Apple that sees Apple clip the ticket on 10 billion searches a week across Safari - and Chrome searches in iPhones - the search giant's revenues on mobile could be crippled. It could also lose access to the very data it needs to train its AI models that will fuel the next generation of search. A Forrester analyst says we could see Google divest its search business. Apple also stands to lose tens of billions in revenues. According to the US Federal Court ruling in the case brought by the US Department of Justice, at one point the search deal accounted for 17.5 per cent of Apple's operating profits although it can replace the losses by launching its own search business, something it's toyed with in the past.

Big tech firms such as Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Salesforce used Australian content scraped from YouTube to train their databases without the permission of copyright holders, and contrary to Alphabet's rules, courtesy of an open-source AI Institute that scrapes content and then licenses the data. EleutherAI, partly funded by Canva, uses fair use provisions in the US to circumvent Australian law. ABC News, Nine's Sixty Minutes, The Australian Greens, half a dozen local universities, and myriad government departments have content that has been hoovered up by EleutherA. It's the latest example of tech giants gifting themselves new rights over others IP. It's all fair game, says Microsoft's AI chief.

Tech vendors are rewriting platform usage rulebooks, adjusting terms and conditions – and privacy policies – to give themselves legal cover, and in some cases to gift themselves new rights over customer data and content. But even when they are trying to do the right thing, their preference for legal compliance over messaging clarity is leaving customers angry and confused. And a new generation of digital giants has bastardised Mark Zuckerberg's famous entreaty to "move fast and break things." But while the Zuck was talking about internal design processes, the generative AI newcomers are breaking long-held conventions and rules, and arguably laws, by stealing IP according to long-suffering publishers. Mi3 asked some martech majors specifically whether they use customer data to train large language models or other AI. The answers were not always binary.

Despite the almost banal nature of the announcement – a single throwaway line in an earnings call – Oracle's adtech surrender looks like the result of a gross miscalculation, say analysts. But it also speaks volumes about the state of digital advertising markets amid growing privacy concerns over the surveillance of consumers by brands and their technology enablers. Analysts largely agree that attempts by martech vendors to merge adtech and martech into a single unified 'madtech' operating system failed. But at least one analyst told Mi3 that CDPs have helped brands better link the two different worlds. Maybe. But now gen AI enters the mix.

It was the worst of times, and now hopefully the best of times as Nine says it is on track to deliver all of its data-driven commitments to its Olympic sponsors - despite having to overcome delays in standing up a CDP it began implementing in 2021. The early problems — including promised functionality that didn't materialise — were so bad and delayed the project to such an extent the media giant went back to market with a new tender in the second half of last year.  That did the trick although to the surprise of many in the tech sector, and despite a comprehensive evaluation of alternatives from companies like Tealium and Salesforce, and composable solutions from Hightouch and others, Nine stuck with Adobe. And it's not the only data-driven solution developed by Nine using Adobe’s technology that has initially caused it grief - Audience Match, now regarded as a revenue winner and a strategic asset, likewise ran into early problems when Nine connected into Adobe. But just like the CDP, Nine has pulled that project back on course and is now delivering wins for the company and its clients.

Clear strategy and hefty innovations won't help if the customer isn't ready to buy. Push them too hard and they will push back as Sitecore has learned. A little over a month ago it parted ways with CEO Steve Tzikakis and Chairman Jonas Persson and appointed Dave O'Flanagan as interim CEO, before subsequently appointing him full-time in late April. The interim also saw the departure of key executives as O'Flanagan, a product guy, began bringing in his own team. The changes happened after private equity business EQT tried to exit the business, but couldn't find a buyer at a time when tech sector valuations remain under pressure. So now, the firm is holding its investment and counting on O'Flanagan to deliver a return on all the cheques it and its partners have written; well north of a billion dollars since 2016. In his first media interview since taking the job, O'Flanagan tells Mi3 Australia while the company will continue to put composability at the heart of its strategy and along with the shift to the cloud, he recognises that not all customers are ready for the move. Cue a change in messaging.

The martech ecosystem is expanding aggressively thanks to gen AI, even as martech stacks are shrinking, and as software composability's moment looks like it has finally arrived, according to the sector's most anticipated annual technology stocktake. Old models of parsing the martech ecosystem, such as build vs. buy are melting away as a result. In the future CMOs might be making best-of-feature choices driven by everything from pricing, usability, and governance considerations. 

Google might have delayed its third-party cookie deprecation regime yet again, but brands shouldn't wait until it gets it right. If anything, the expansion of the UK inquiry led by the Competition and Markets Authority beyond competition into privacy matters creates even more uncertainty and incentive for marketers to take control of their own destiny. The UK inquiry matters because other regulators, especially in Europe, are likely to follow its lead. Critics are scathing of both Google's motives and in some instances its competence, while locally ADMA says brands need to get cracking. Industry leaders and agencies say the world is already moving on.