Branch vs Zeta Global

Branch Launches New Blog: How To Simplify Attribution With AI Data Analysis

Branch has published a new blog post titled 'How To Simplify Attribution With AI Data Analysis', which discusses how AI tools can help marketers answer exploratory, diagnostic, comparative, and benchmarking queries about their attribution data.

Branch Launches New Blog Post: How To Simplify Attribution With AI Data Analysis

Branch published a new blog post titled 'How To Simplify Attribution With AI Data Analysis', highlighting how AI tools can help marketers answer exploratory, diagnostic, comparative, and benchmarking queries about their attribution data.

Building Advertiser Analytics in a Post-Identifier World

An ExchangeWire blog post (published 2026-08-27) that lists hundreds of advertising vendors registered in an IAB TCF vendor/consent registry and details each vendor's declared consent purposes, legitimate-interest uses, special purposes, features, categories of data collected, data retention periods and consent/ cookie expiry/tracking methods. The page functions as a vendor transparency/consent directory tied to IAB TCF, showing how many AdTech/MarTech companies classify their data use and retention in a world moving away from device identifiers. It is primarily a technical/reference resource for advertiser analytics, privacy compliance and vendor inventory auditing.

• Article published on 2026-08-27.
• Page lists vendors who are part of the IAB TCF 1013 registry and shows each vendor's consent purposes, special purposes, features, categories of data and retention periods.
• Includes hundreds of AdTech/MarTech companies (examples: Branch Metrics, Tappx, 33Across, Criteo, Amazon Ads, Google Advertising Products, LiveRamp, PubMatic, Magnite).

Attentive VP Jema Birkmeyer Discusses AI's Role in Lifecycle Marketing

In a MarTech Series interview, Jema Birkmeyer, VP of Strategic Accounts at Attentive, discusses the evolving landscape of lifecycle marketing as AI and agentic AI take on more campaign decisions. She highlights a shift from rule-based marketing to direction-setting, where AI handles millions of real-time decisions about audience, messaging, timing, and channel, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and creativity. Birkmeyer emphasizes the need to balance short-term conversions with long-term customer value, noting that 65% of shoppers are open to more relevant messages, while 80% ignore irrelevant ones. She discusses the changing role of segmentation, the importance of deliberate testing for creative and strategy, and the risk of brands losing relevance through over-automation. The interview underscores that AI enhances but does not replace the need for human insight and creativity in building lasting customer relationships.

• Jema Birkmeyer is VP of Strategic Accounts at Attentive.
• Attentive is an omnichannel marketing platform for SMS, email, RCS, and push.
• 65% of shoppers are open to more messages if relevant; 80% ignore irrelevant messages.

Old Marketing Goals Are Obsolete in an AI, Privacy-First World

Writing for CMSWire, Chad S. White argues that four traditional marketing goals are becoming obsolete as AI, privacy regulation, and changing consumer behavior reshape digital marketing. Brand stewards should aim for functional brand experiences rather than pixel-perfect consistency, since email rendering and AI summarization tools vary across inboxes. The article also contends that Google search visibility no longer guarantees reach, because AI Overviews and large language models have reduced referral traffic; brands should diversify across social platforms, marketplaces, and owned channels. In a privacy-first environment, campaign-level KPIs are losing value, pushing marketers to centralize customer data and measure long-term customer relationship metrics such as lifetime value. Finally, with AI agents increasingly acting for customers, the author advises marketers to write clear, literal copy that machines can interpret correctly, calling this an essential shift for agentic commerce.

• The article was published on CMSWire on September 3, 2026, by Chad S. White.
• Gartner predicts mobile app usage will decrease 25% by 2027 due to AI assistants.
• The article says AI Overviews and LLMs have cratered referral traffic, especially for publishers.

The Many Pitfalls of Digital Marketing Benchmarks

This article explains why digital marketing benchmarks often vary across sources and can mislead marketers. Key factors include bot filtering, differing metric definitions (especially regarding Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and auto-open counting), platform defaults like double opt-in, and variations by industry and country. The author advises using benchmarks from your own platform provider, segmenting by industry and country, and comparing year-over-year changes rather than raw numbers. Importantly, most published benchmarks measure channel health (opens, clicks, deliverability) rather than revenue or conversion performance. The article emphasizes that benchmarks cannot account for a brand's specific practices and should be supplemented with self-run tests and holdout experiments.

• Zeta Global's Marketing Benchmark Report states financial services true open rates averaged 18.83% in Q1 2026, nearly double the all-industry average of 10.0%.
• Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (introduced in 2021) causes ESPs to report open rates differently, with some including auto-opens, inflating rates.
• Click bots, both malicious and beneficial, can skew campaign performance data, and platforms have mixed incentives to filter them.