CDP Institute

Salesforce is renaming its Customer Data Platform, from Customer 360 Audiences to Salesforce CDP.  New features available today include Tableau integration and calculated metrics. Mulesoft integration, improved segmentation, and AppExchange app integration will be released later this year.  Salesforce CDP uses the same data platform of Salesforce Sales, Service, and Commerce clouds, which makes it easier share data with those systems.  Marketing Cloud is still on a separate platform.

Adobe has added the MediaWallah identity graph to its Real-time CDP integrations, enabling clients to add online and offline identifiers to customer records. The integration will make it easier for Adobe clients to unify customer data from different sources and to enrich profiles with MediaWallah data. You may recall that Adobe announced a similar integration with Merkle’s Merkury ID resolution technology last month.

How big is the U.S. podcast ad market? Funny you should ask: the IAB estimates it will top $1 billion in 2021, after growing a pandemic-fueled 19% in 2020. It’s a place to spend some of those ad dollars made less effective by targeting-hostile privacy rules. Speaking of: HubSpot just launched a podcast network but the mission is to deliver content to its audience of entrepreneurs and marketers (and entrepreneurial marketers), not to sell advertising.

Marketing is the least data-driven of all departments covered in this Talend survey: 48% of marketers make less than half their decisions based on data, compared with 23% of IT and 33% of engineering leaders.  Just 40% of executives always trust the data they work with and 22% don’t think their company’s investment in data management is worth it.  Read on and weep.

Maybe all this modern technology really is a waste after all. The folks at the Mapp Cloud marketing platform are excited that their latest enhancement is – be sure you’re sitting down – direct mail! But why, you ask? “Direct mail can be used for a wide range of applications,” asserts Mapp, and follows with a handy list. Who knew?

Up for something a little more modern?  Language optimization vendor Phrasee has partnered with customer engagement platform Braze to optimize language in email subject lines, headline copy and push notifications.  No mention of whether they’re advanced enough to optimize direct mail too.

This BlueVenn study contains all sorts of juicy tidbits.  Two faves: just 37% of U.S. marketers and 45% of U.K. marketers say their CDP is fully integrated with other systems; and about half collect but ignore customer preferences for contact channel and frequency.  Much more comparing consumer vs marketer opinions (spoiler alert: marketers aren’t doing as a good a job as they think).

CDP vendor Amperity is doing its bit to improve CDP integration, adding over 120 new connectors with its latest release.  Other changes include a new read-only data warehouse for analysis tools, expanded campaign functions, and no-cookie identity management.

No-code chatbot maker Ada has raised a $130 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $190 million.  The product lets customer service employees build self-service tools for customers, which would seem to put both programmers and support agents out of work.  That’s progress, right?

What’s the biggest data-related headache?  This Databricks-sponsored MIT Technology Review survey of chief data officers found that half are looking for a new data management platform, with greater scalability and processing speed as their top goals.  Access and quality were lower priorities: in fact, 66% said their analysts can already access all the data they need.  Adding new types such as real-time streams and unstructured data was their smallest concern.

Unstructured data looms as a bigger problem in this Forrester research for customer comment collector Reputation.  They found that 70% of digital marketing and CX decision-makers believe unstructured data is important in meeting CX goals, but 42% struggle to make sense of customer feedback.  Fun fact: respondents collect feedback from an average of six touchpoints and store it in 5.5 tools.

Or maybe the biggest problem really is data sharing after all.  Planning system vendor Digital.ai als found that 99% of companies agree it’s important to share business planning data but 34% do it poorly.  They win the prize for conflicting answers: 95% of respondents said digital transformation is going well but 91% said they need to get more from their DT initiatives and 54% said DT problems have hurt their company’s bottom line.