CDP Institute

CDP Daily deals in just the facts, ma’am, so we weren’t going to write about the sure-to-be-changed Banning Surveillance Advertising Act introduced in Congress last week.  But the industry opposition has been so overwrought – 17 Million Jobs at Risk! The Internet Will Die! – that we feel a need to inject some reality. The clearest analysis I could find says the law allows targeting based on first party data but not third party data. What’s not clear whether publishers could use their own (first party) data to target ads... Read More >

Whatever happens with new privacy laws, marketers will need to deal with the loss of third party cookies and restrictions on data sharing.  Braze reports that 96% plan to increase marketing budgets, 42% plan to add new channels, and 38% will put more emphasis on zero- and first-party data.  Improved data management tops the list of brand concerns for 2022.

Jamie in our Department of the Obvious offers this study from The Predictive Index, which finds that companies who put the right people in the right roles, create remote-friendly and inclusive workplaces, and prioritize health benefits have significantly lower turnover than those that don’t.  Glad we straightened that out.

Do you miss those innocent days when every product announcement breathlessly reported the new system or feature was “AI-based”? If so, here’s a whiff of remembrance from AI infrastructure provider SambaNova Systems, who found that 78% of large companies rate AI and Machine Learning as important revenue drivers. Yet even they have a curiously mixed attitude, citing (in their press release) a NewVantage Partners study that found only a quarter of top companies have scaled AI/ML across their organization.

Meanwhile, this DataRobot study takes a darker view, reporting that 54% of tech leaders are concerned about AI bias, up from 42% in 2019.  A surprising (to me) 81% think government regulation would be helpful even though 45% also worry regulations would make adoption more difficult.  In a classic “not my problem” result, 90% are at least somewhat moderately confident that their own organization can identify AI bias.

Still dark and closer to home for marketers, IBM looked at AI bias in programmatic advertising.  Working with industry groups, they’ve released an open source toolkit AI Fairness 360 that can detect it.  They concluded potentially harmful bias does exist but were optimistic that technical cures could be found, although ad efficiency might suffer.

And then there were none: experience analytics vendor Medallia is buying Thunderhead, the last major independent journey orchestration platform.  Previous acquisitions in the field have included: Pointillist bought by Genesys in October 2021; Kitewheel acquired by CSG in July 2021; and Usermind acquired by Qualtrics, also in July 2021.

The trend for supersized martech funding rounds continued today with a $200 million Series E for 6sense, the once-struggling, now-surging account based marketing platform.  Total 6sense funding now stands at $426 million.  6sense probably has a CDP buried somewhere inside of it, having acquired ZenIQ back in 2018.

If you want to put marketing and advertising in a broader context, take a look at Winterberry Group’s 13th annual Advertising, Marketing, and Data industry outlook report.  They’re bullish on industry growth in general, reporting a 21.5% increase in 2021, after a 4.8% decline in 2019, and projecting another 11.8% growth in 2022.  Fun fact: Winterberry says more is spent on influencer marketing and on audio marketing than on email.

Location data plays an increasingly important role in marketing analytics, especially as tracking known individuals is constrained by privacy regulations.  So it makes sense that Clearlake-backed data quality vendor Precisely has decided to purchase location data leader PlaceIQ.  The deal will (literally) add a new dimension to Precisely’s data enhancement and targeting capabilities.

The term “revenue operations” is having its moment of buzz.  It’s how Clari describes itself, although “sales forecasting” might be more clear.  In any case, Clari just raised a $225 million Series F, bringing total funding to $496 million and quadrupling the company’s valuation in two years.

Here’s a trio of surprisingly consistent reports on the dark side of cloud computing. Dynatrace finds that companies are struggling to multi-cloud environments; Nutanix reports pretty much the same thing; and Stacklet says that governance is a “significant inhibitor” to cloud adoption. Of course, all three companies are selling solutions to the problem, but this still suggests that IT departments are finding cloud migrations are not as easy as they once seemed.