Salesforce emphasized “real-time” and “decisioning” in yesterday’s announced acquisition of AI-powered customer engagement platform Braze for $5.66 billion.
A Salesforce press release explained:
“Braze’s real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement all four layers of Salesforce’s architecture — Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIForce. Within Customer 360, Braze is expected to strengthen Marketing Cloud’s cross-channel personalization, helping brands turn a deeper view of each customer into richer experiences, optimized in real time at the scale needed to reach hundreds of millions of people.”
The transaction is expected to close early 2027.
Read: “Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Braze” (Oct. 20) – Salesforce
What is a customer engagement platform?
I’ll take a crack at it.
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- Customer data platform (CDP): Knows who the customer is and what they’ve done.
- Customer engagement platform (CEP): Determines how and when to engage customers, and delivers personalized experiences across channels.
- Marketing automation platform: Automates marketing workflows, including campaigns, lead nurturing and email.
- Agentic marketing platform (AMP): Uses AI agents to plan, decide and execute marketing activities with varying degrees of autonomy.
CEP competitive set: “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs” (Sept. 22) – Gartner
From tipsheet: More M&A. In this case, customer engagement platforms are evolving into agentic marketing platforms, and Salesforce is betting billions to accelerate that transition. Braze also brings AI decisioning capabilities to Salesforce’s existing Marketing Cloud. Meanwhile, the traditional marketing technology stack of customer data, decisioning and execution is converging — or getting compressed by AI.
SELL-SIDE
IAB Tech Lab: Apple threatens publishers
Publishers stand to be hurt, too, by Apple’s recent move to block ad technology, argues IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur in a detailed LinkedIn article.
Gauntlet thrown.
He writes:
“Companies are entitled to develop stronger privacy protections. But when those protections go beyond applicable legal requirements, they should also assess the economic consequences of their choices. A policy intended to benefit consumers can inadvertently damage media companies’ ability to generate revenue. Those same consumers depend on publishers for reporting, information, and entertainment. A complete assessment of consumer welfare must include the availability and sustainability of that work.”
His argument: Restrictions on ad delivery, targeting and measurement can make publisher audiences harder to monetize, potentially pushing advertising budgets toward larger platforms.
Ultimately, the piece promotes Tech Lab’s Trusted Server initiative, which moves more advertising functions into publisher-controlled infrastructure, reducing dependence on third-party services operating in browsers and apps.
Read: “Apple Domain Blocking and the Cost to Publishers” (Oct. 20) – Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab on LinkedIn
From tipsheet: Another threat to publishers and, this time, unrelated to AI crawlers.
Katsur raises an important question about Apple’s dual role as privacy gatekeeper and advertising competitor. But there’s another question worth asking: Is Trusted Server a durable solution to platform restrictions or another workaround in the industry’s endless identity arms race?
Related:
PLATFORMS
Google adds KYC-style checks to fight AI scams
Google is expanding its Financial Services Verification program to the U.S. and Canada in early 2027, requiring advertisers running certain financial services ads to demonstrate they’re authorized by regulators or recognized registries.
The verification program, launched in the UK in 2021, already operates in 42 countries, covering approximately 2 billion internet users, according to the company.
Google VP & GM, Ads Privacy and Safety, Keerat Sharma explains how verification complements AI-powered detection:
“Upfront advertiser verification works hand-in-hand with our safety systems. In 2025, Gemini helped our systems catch over 99% of policy-violating ads before they ever served, blocking bad ads in real time.”
It’s that less-than-1% that can be the killer!
Sharma says that more than 97% of ads shown on Google in the U.S. and Canada already come from identity-verified advertisers.
Read: “Expanding our defenses against financial scam ads” (Oct. 20) – Google Ads & Commerce blog
Related — more from Google’s Keerat Sharma:
From tipsheet: Bringing KYC-style verification to advertising creates another potential source of structured data for AI-powered fraud detection.
AI makes it easier for the bad guys to impersonate legitimate financial institutions, while helping the good guys identify suspicious ads. But detecting suspicious creative is only part of the solution. Verified credentials provide another layer of protection by establishing whether advertisers are authorized to offer the services they’re promoting.
AI is going to KYC all of us.
DATA
AI consumer research turns into ad targeting
Neo, it’s actually more than a simulation.
Synthetic research is moving into advertising activation and beyond the discovery of simulated consumer preferences, according to customer intelligence platform Resonate.
The company announced “the launch of Resonate Digital Twins, a synthetic panel grounded in directly collected data and predictions from more than 250 million ID-matched US adults. Resonate Digital Twins answers any brand, agency, or political campaign question and delivers the answer as an activation-ready audience within five days.”
The company claims a 93% average match between synthetic and traditional research. In other words, its AI-generated consumer responses reportedly closely resemble those obtained by surveying actual people.
So, faster and, probably, cheaper is the pitch. Pricing isn’t discussed.
Read: “Built to Activate, Not Just Simulate: Resonate Launches Digital Twins to Turn Synthetic Answers into Real Audiences” (Oct. 20) – press release
From tipsheet: The interesting development is the connection between simulated consumer preferences and real, addressable individuals. Resonate is attempting to collapse consumer research, audience modeling and media activation into one workflow. Whether targeting those audiences produces incremental sales will be something to watch.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
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- New models, old programming: “Advancing coding in low‑resource programming languages” (Oct. 20) – OpenAI
- Open: DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer (Oct. 20) – Bloomberg (subscription)
- Sensor Tower data: “Meta’s Muse hits 10M U.S. downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps” (Oct. 20) – TechCrunch
MORE
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- Paid GEO: “Today, we’re excited to launch Starter, a self-serve plan that lets any brand or agency use our agent to run ChatGPT ads, built on AI visibility data.” – Brian Stempeck, CEO and co-founder, Evertune on LinkedIn
- GEO intel: “Bazaarvoice and Profound partner to help brands drive optimal UGC strategies for AI search visibility and measurement” (Oct. 20) – press release
- AI production revolution: “Reuters’ Paul Bascobert on the AI production shock” (Oct. 20) – Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting
- Pinterest visual search ads promo: “Paid Search Changed Advertising. Visual Search Could Be the Next Chapter.” – Jason Fairchild, CEO, tvScientific by Pinterest on the company blog