CDP Institute

Yesterday’s items on third party cookies prompted one reader to remind me that 70% of online advertising happens within the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, where cookies are irrelevant.

Whether Signal called itself a CDP matters less than the fact that TransUnion felt the need to acquire Signal’s CDP-like capabilities. But if you want evidence that the bloom is off the CDP rose, here’s Gartner’s latest digital marketing hype cycle, which shows CDP well into the trough of disillusionment. Don’t take that as bad news: the whole point of the hype cycle is that the trough is a necessary stop on the path to success.

We originally classified Signal as a Customer Data Platform, but the company repositioned as an identity resolution system so we took them at their word. New management has since pivoted back in the CDP direction although they don’t use the term. It’s now moot, since they were just purchased by data collection giant TransUnion, which describes them as a tool for real-time data collection and customer data management.

Advertisers outside the U.S. don’t share the obsession with measuring programmatic ROI, finds this IAB report. While 48% of U.S. marketers listed ROI attribution as a top objective when bringing operations programmatic in-house, just 18% of European and 19% of Latin American marketers said the same. Respondents said privacy regulations have had little impact so far on programmatic profitability. But companies are building up their first party data resources to be ready for the future.

U.S. marketers are struggling to measure the return on their programmatic advertising investment, according to this Forrester study for MediaMath. While 94% say they try to measure programmatic ROI, just 33% say they can do it completely and accurately. More than half (55%) say privacy rules are restricting programmatic targeting and 45% say new rules are making it harder to maintain scale.

Right on cue, here’s another report on vendors vying to replace those much-lamented third party cookies. Email ad platform LiveIntent is partnering with identify resolution vendor FullContact to createa a privacy-safe ID that tracks consumers across channels. LiveIntent is working hard at this: you may recall it has previously announced related alliances with Kochava and RubiconProject.

This report from personalization vendor Formation.ai found an increase in loyalty compared with five years ago, but responses were collected before the pandemic began. The over-all finding that personalization generates loyalty is still probably valid, although customers like personalized rewards and discounts much more than personalized advertising. One weird twist: personalized Web experience, marketing email, and mobile notifications were rated both the most likely to increase brand loyalty and to decrease it.

One reason for less loyalty has been a decline in service levels, according to Simplr research. A mystery shopper study found that email and chat wait times have increased despite brands using more digital service channels. More subtly: nearly all complex bot experiences ranked as “very poor” unless a human was standing by to help.

How loyal are new customers acquired during the pandemic? Not very, according to this Braze survey. While 26% of consumers have tried at least one new brand during the pandemic, their retention rate is 82% lower than customers added during previous non-COVID, non-holiday periods. A whopping 91% said they’ll consider how brands behaved during the pandemic when deciding where to shop in the future.

Back on the more familiar turf of Citizen Developers, Parabola has raised an $8 million Series A for its no-code tool to automate data tasks. They’ve also added a Shopify integration, joining Mailchimp, HubSpot, Magento, and many others.

Adobe has expanded the data governance capabilities in its Real-time CDP, enabling users to label data based on its privacy status and use the labels to define and enforce usage restrictions. The company positions the enhancements as a way to empower users outside of IT. Yep,we’re talking Citizen Data Governors, although Adobe hasn’t yet used the term.