CDP Institute

As you’ve surely noticed, we fall back on surveys when there’s no real news. Here’s one from Usersnap about customer experience management, by which they mostly mean customer support. Key points: 56% of B2C companies have a dedicated CX team compared with just 19% of B2B companies; and, “customer centric” organization grow three times faster than the rest.

And when all else fails, we can fuss about social media. Let’s pluck a random item from the ether: Google-owned YouTube has unilaterally changed its terms of service to let it run ads on some videos without sharing revenue with the creator. Most affected will be creators with too little volume to qualify for YouTube’s Partner Program. This could include B2B marketers with niche audiences, whose viewers might now see ads for competing products. How does that sound?

Expect a slow week in martech news, Dear Reader. At least the nice people at Spiceworks Ziff Davis have tossed us a small bone by purchasing Aberdeen, which generates intent data about B2B buyers through research, media, and demand generation programs. It’s the latest expansion by Ziff, which purchased Spiceworks itself last year and Revenu8, which published MarTech Advisor, in 2018.

The Pubmatic study also found that poor measurability is among the top obstacles to OTT TV advertising, with privacy and security close behind. Nielsen can’t help with privacy but they’re making a big push to improve measurement. They’ve recently added connections to 55 million devices including Vizio smart TVs, DISH and AT&T DIRECTV set-top boxes, and Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising panel.

Let’s take a break from worrying about third-party cookies to look at one cookie-free ad alternative: streaming video and connected TVs. Pixalate reports that programmatic ad spend on connected TVs rose 70% from the first quarter of 2020 to the third quarter, and reaches 72% of U.S. households. Pubmatic found that Over-The-Top (OTT) TV ad revenue already accounts for 30% of programmatic video ad revenue for U.S. publishers who offer the option. OTT includes video on mobile devices as well as connected TVs.

Drilling into streaming video, Integral Ad Science found that 88% of consumers watch at least some streaming video. Nearly all (91%) of that group watch ad-supported video although 55% skip ads when they can. Nielsen says that streaming accounts for 25% of total TV viewing. 

More ID news: Nielsen has revealed its own cookieless ID system, based on the increasingly-popular Unified ID 2.0 framework being developed by Trade Desk. Unified ID 2.0 relies on hashed and encrypted email addresses. Also: Neustar is leveraging its cookie-free cross channel ID system, Fabrik, for a marketing analytics solution that combines marketing mix models and multi-touch attribution.

Meanwhile, this Rackspace survey finds there is no radical shift towards building rather than buying software, even though no code/low code technologies are widely adopted. But they also find that companies are focusing their building on customer-facing systems that create unique competitive advantages. Especially interesting, companies cite the same reasons in the same order for both building and buying: ease of use/implementation, competitive advantage, customization, and cost savings.

Experian has purchased identity resolution vendor Tapad, one of the few remaining companies building cross-device identity graphs. New privacy laws have stressed Tapad’s business but also made compliant graphs more valuable to customer data companies like Experian.

DataQ never made my list of CDPs, although they call themselves one and may actually qualify. It’s pretty much moot now, since they were just purchased by ecommerce marketing agency Power Digital, which will use them to support its own customers. We can still cite them as another an independent CDP acquired during the pandemic.