CDP Institute

Switching gears: the Marketing AI Institute (no relation) reports that AI is still an aspiration for most companies: just 17% of marketers said it’s deployed widely at their company, although 80% think more than a quarter of their tasks will be automated five years from now.  Lack of training was by far the most common barrier (70%); poor technology and data were far down the list at 35% and 31%, respectively.

Ecommerce marketing automation platform Klaviyo is no slouch when it comes to fund-raising, notching $358 million to date. But their latest news is benchmarks that let clients compare measures including average order value, open rates, click-throughs, and abandoned carts against average results for similar companies within Klaviyo’s 65,000+ client base. They’ve also added “conversational” SMS.

6sense, which unifies B2B account engagement for marketing and sales teams, has raised a $125 million Series D, bringing total funding to $226 million.  The system relies heavily on machine learning to build a unified data layer, predict next best action per account, and orchestrate customer journeys.  We’ve never called them a CDP but they probably qualify.

Headspin!  Look!  Airtable has new marketing workflows.  Is pre-built faster than no-code?  Call it agi-code!  Zip!

Over here!  Zip!  Crownpeak found 94% of marketers and IT pros say speed and agility are important to digital experience management.  Too many big words.  Marketers want more speed.  Zip!

Zip. Zip. Zip. Let’s talk agile.  Over there!  AgileSherpas found agile marketers are better at adapting to change.  Zip!

Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and more, is clearly a martech enthusiast. They just bought online ordering and marketing platform Tictuk, following an early March deal for AI-based consumer insights and marketing analytics firm Kvantum. It’s intriguing that Yum! wants to own this technology, especially since McDonald’s may sell part of the Dynamic Yield personalization platform it acquired in 2019.

Marketers may or may not love AI, but vendors keep trying. Anyword, formerly Keywee, recently added a $19/month pricing tier and enhanced its “Language Optimization Platform,” which promises to pick the best word for performance marketing ads. Meanwhile, AI-powered video ad creator Pencil has partnered with ecommerce funding provider Clearbanc to offer Pencil’s services to the 4,000+ Clearbanc-backed companies.

Marketing is less interested than other departments in data and analytics, according to this Alation study.  Operations, compliance, finance, and sales are all more frequent proponents.  Marketing and product share fifth place while customer service and human resources bring up the rear.  Alation also reports that AI adoption is broad but shallow: 76% of firms have deployed some AI but just 8% use it throughout their organization.

B2B martech vendor Integrate has introduced Demand Acceleration Platform, whose snappy acronym of DAP should not be confused with the popular brand of spackle.  Like its namesake drywall adhesive, DAP is a versatile glue that connects “hundreds of technology companies, data partners, service providers and marketing agencies, thousands of events and trade shows, and a marketplace of 150+ publishers” to create orchestrated, personalized, cross-channel, paintable customer journeys.  Maybe not paintable.

CDP Optimove just announced new real time segmentation capabilities, which can assign customers to segments using both real time streaming data and historical information.  The combination lets marketers adjust customer treatments based on current activities and journey stage or loyalty status.

Let’s do product news today.  Acquia has launched a new Experience Platform, which includes a content management system, no-code Web site builder, and Drupal development environment.  It also improved analytics, reporting, and compliance workflows in its Marketing Cloud, which includes Acquia’s CDP.