CDP Institute

Marketers aren’t doing very well when it comes to understanding their customers, either.  MMA Global and AppsFlyer found marketers overestimate consumers’ concern about controlling their data and underestimate their annoyance that other people make money from it.  More cluelessness: just 16% of marketers think privacy concerns impact consumer behavior, while 44% of consumers say it does.

It’s not your imagination: wrangling marketing data is tough.  Nearly half (43%) of marketers spend more than one week per month assembling information, according to this Salesforce report, and just 31% are “very confident” it’s accurate.  One reason: the average marketer uses 21 different marketing and advertising platforms.  Lots more good stuff here.

And for the triopoly trifecta: Amazon’s share of the U.S. digital ad market grew to 10.3% in 2020, up from 7.8% the year before, says eMarketer.  The company took business from Google, whose share dropped to 26.6% from 28.9%.  Facebook’s share also grew, from 23.6% to 25.2%.  Everyone else’s slide of the got a bit smaller, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Facebook cares mostly about selling your data, but they’ll take your money directly too.  They’re testing a new QR code payment feature to make it easier to use their Facebook Pay money transfer service.  Talk about strategic fit: trust is essential for financial services providers and who doesn’t trust Facebook?

Customer identity data company LiveRamp announced an API integration on the Google Cloud Marketplace.  This means Google Cloud users will be able to access LiveRamp’s identity services and data  without custom development.  LiveRamp says the move enhances consumer privacy since companies don’t have to send their data to partners for processing.  Our privacy advocate friends are unconvinced.

Trust plays a role in no-code systems but the reason I’m writing about Upsolver is that it assembles data from multiple sources and makes it available for analysis.  It’s not exactly a CDP but does show how cloud technologies are serving some CDP-like functions.  Upsolver just raised a $25 million Series B and released a free “community” edition so you can try it for yourself.

Digital identity is about trusting that someone is who they say they are – or, rather, finding ways to check their claim. It’s becoming more important to marketers as they rely more on first-party data. So you might care that identity network ID.me, which gives consumers control over their own credentials, recently raised a $100 million Series C. A bit before that, identity verifier Socure had its own $100 million round.

You might be surprised to learn that global trust levels actually increased a bit last year, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.  But there were plenty of dark spots, including sharp declines in trust in the tech industry and media.  You can probably use the report to prove any point you want, although there’s no reason to think anyone would believe you.

Third party data isn’t dead or even dying: in fact, 78% of companies plan to increase their data acquisition budget in 2021, according to this Explorium study.  Demographics, company, financial, and anonymized individual data are the most common purchases, while business intelligence, advanced analytics, and predictive models are almost tied as the most common applications.

Small companies are heavily focused on personalization while bigger ones worry more about identity resolution, according to this Neilsen report.  Fewer than 20% of all sizes are very confident they have the right martech, between a quarter and a half plan to increase martech spend in the next year, and bigger companies are much more interested in second party data.  Good stuff.