CDP Institute

The News Gods have been mostly on vacation this week, but they did share that casino and events operator Bally’s Corporation is buying Telescope Inc., which builds real-time engagement solutions for live and online events.  The deal will bolster Bally’s interactive brands.  It’s an example of brands buying technology companies instead of just using their products.

While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor.  Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents.  Price was $50 million.

So many companies are offering post-cookie, cross-channel identity solutions that it’s not clear whether a new one really counts as news.  But Samba TV does have an interesting story, starting with data from sensors built into smart TVs and extending that through probabilistic matching to identify all devices in a household.   They just launched a proprietary identifier, SambaID, which will let advertisers buy and measure deduplicated household-level audiences across digital devices.

Martech stacks changed more in the past year than the three previous years combined, say 77% of marketers in this Sitecore survey.  But the silver lining has a cloud: 72% said most of the changes were short-term fixes that will have to be cleaned up in the future.  Oh, and most of that martech innovation was aimed at moving technology to the cloud, while customer loyalty, personalization, and integration got reduced attention.

Marketers in this Salesforce report also report lots of pandemic-driven changes.  But the longer-term trends are more interesting: a doubling in the number of B2C data sources from 2020 to 2022; increase in “dynamic cross-channel coordination” from 31% in 2018 to 68% in 2021; 70% say they have a CDP.  Especially intriguing: just 26% say privacy compliance is challenging, down from 32% last year.

I’m not sure what to make of this item: programmatic video platform Tremor Video says it has breached the walled gardens with a collection of 85 million U.S. consumer profiles that span multiple social platforms.  What seems to be going on is they use ICX Media profiles with segments derived from social media activity, such as posts, shares, and comments.  Delivery comes through connected TV and other video campaigns.  Vague but interesting.

Someone at Salesforce has taken the “every company is a publisher” cliché a bit too literally, resulting in Salesforce+, a new content streaming service that promises endless hours of Salesforce-related materials.  There will be no fewer than four channels featuring a slate of live experiences, on-demand videos, and – everyone’s favorite – the best of Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce keynotes.  Watch for plush costumes.

In slightly less bizarre broadcast news, media quality service Integral Ad Science has purchased connected TV ad platform Publica.  It sounds like a referee becoming a player, but IAS apparently sees it as improving the game for everyone.  Price was $220 million including 75% cash and 25% stock.

Contextual ad analytics expert GumGum has also jumped closer to the publisher side by buying JustPremium, one of the largest rich media and video ad marketplaces in Europe.  The deal will give GumGum more places to insert its contextually-targeted ad units.  Price wasn’t announced.

In case you still question whether marketing ops is Officially A Thing, this Brandmaker report finds 70% of senior marketers say their company has a dedicated marketing ops team and 73% say that team is responsible for both martech and tracking campaign performance.  The most-desired improvement was better integration of the tech stack, but, oddly, integration ranked fifth as an investment priority.  Download for lots more.

Shaped By’s survey of tech marketers also highlighted the role of tech: half the respondents said marketing is dominated by technology while about one-quarter said it was dominated by creativity.  (The rest said they’re about equal.)   Interestingly, small businesses put tech dominance much higher (61%) while enterprise marketers split evenly on tech vs creativity (37% each).  I’d guess that small businesses struggle more with tech because they have fewer resources, but maybe there’s something else going on.

Things look a bit different from the IT perspective. ServiceNow consultants Acorio found that companies are more focused on internal efficiency than customer satisfaction: for example, 76% track time to resolve an incident as a Key Performance Indicator while just 19% track customer satisfaction. Similarly, GenPact reports that CIOs are prioritizing projects such as artificial intelligence and cloud migrations, with customer experience tech ranked sixth on the list. One welcome bit of realism: just 22% of CIOs thought they were the primary drivers of digital transformation, while 61% recognized they... Read More >