CDP Institute

App store revenue streams keep springing new leaks. The latest is at Google Cloud marketplace, which will reportedly cut its revenue share from 20% to 3%. The Cloud marketplace is separate from the Play Store for android apps, which already reduced its revenue share in July, following a similar cut by Apple. Microsoft cut the Windows app store share of game purchase revenue in August, and just announced its app store will now allow third party storefronts.

The beleaguered walled garden vendors also face new competition for ad revenue, most notably from TikTok, which just passed one billion users. TikTok is moving quickly to help ad buyers come aboard, with a bucket of new features to connect brands with content creators, to create content and ads, and to measure results. They’ve also added partnerships with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify for ad safety and fraud protection.

Retail is another battle front for BigTech. Walmart has been leading the charge but grocery chain Albertsons is now stepping to the fore. In a  flurry of moves, they’ve recently partnered with Pinterest to help shoppers plan meals, added shoppable livestream video from Firework, and teamed with DoorDash to let shoppers add restaurant orders to their grocery deliveries at no extra charge.

International Sloth Day – the traditional day for CDP product announcements – is several weeks away, but some vendors couldn’t wait. Amperity yesterday launched Amperity 4.0, which features real-time event streaming, self-optimizing predictive models, new connectors, more precise data access control, faster queries, and more.

CDP Blueshift also jumped the gun by announcing an extension of its journey orchestration to support all channels including commerce, sales, loyalty, and support.  The vendor has also added a new App Hub with 80+ integrations including direct mail, support, CRM, IVR, paid media, and other partners.

Switching to ad measurement: NielsenIQ has purchased omnichannel analytics vendor Data Impact and e-commerce purchase panel builder Rakuten Intelligence.  The deals will extend NielsenIQ’s own retail sales data to provide a more complete view ecommerce results. Separately, Accretive Media has launched an automated out-of-home ad measurement product that combines data on screen locations, consumer households, online and offline sales, foot traffic, website visits, and app downloads. Also: LoopMe has introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement, which uses surveys to measure brand lift across all digital channels in real time.

There’s nothing like a hefty CDP funding round to start the week.  We have that today courtesy of Optimove, which announced $75 million raise, bringing its total to $95 million.

In classic lemonade-from-lemons style, Google is adapting to the loss of cookies by switching Google Ads’ default conversion reporting away from click-based methods to machine learning-based attribution models.  The company swears its technique drives lower cost-per-acquisition, and it probably does.  But it also requires you to trust that they’ll honestly report results since there’s no way to check their work.

Data observability platform Bigeye has raised a $45 million Series B, bringing its total to $66 million.  I know you probably don’t care, Dear Reader, but am reporting it anyway because it’s important to recognize the booming growth of data management tools that help IT departments construct their own customer data management systems.

This Harris Poll study for Redpoint Global offers a sobering view of customer experience reality.  They found that marketers are twice as likely as consumers to think brands deliver an excellent experience (51% vs 26%), while under half of the marketers who use advanced technologies including personalization, AI-driven recommendations, or multi-variate testing think they are having great success with them.  Fun fact: the average number of customer engagement systems is now 16, nearly double the figure in 2019.

Here’s another fun fact: the average company has 254 SaaS applications, according to this survey from SaaS management vendor Productiv.  Less fun: just 45% of those apps are used on a regular basis, although the rate is a slightly higher 54% for apps that departments select for themselves.  Small surprise: the average marketing departments uses 44 SaaS apps, which is fewer than most other departments.

If you’re collecting stats on CDP usage, 25% of brand marketers surveyed for Winterberry Group have a CDP and another 9% plan to add one.  That compares with 58% having an enterprise data warehouse and 65% with a marketing database.  The main thrust of the study is customer journey management, and Winterberry concludes that the going so far has been rough: it finds just 17% of companies are “journey focused”, while 58% are still organized around campaigns.  Download for detailed maturity models, if you’re into that sort of thing.