CDP Institute

I’m sure you heard about Facebook’s statement that Apple’s new privacy restrictions could cut $10 billion from its 2022 ad revenuel, so I won’t bother to report it. But here’s a bit more background from PubMatic, which found that 41% of iOS 14.5 ad requests still have the IDFA device ID, meaning the user opted in. That’s down from 75% on pre-14.5 devices. PubMatic also reports that ads with IDFA sell for 2.4 times the price of those without.

Google and Facebook are still the kings of online ad revenue, with estimated 2021 revenues of $210 billion and $117 billion respectively. But Amazon last week revealed it had $31 billion in ad revenue in 2021, ending much speculation and confirming its Number Three position. It already sells more than YouTube and is growing very, very fast.

Here’s more about adtech: Paris-based Weborama has purchased Adways, which shows video ads by overlaying them on or around editorial content, thus ensuring they cannot be skipped.  It’s a new role for Weborama, whose current business is based on using semantic analysis to classify web content for contextual ad targeting.

Connected TV is one of advertising’s main frontiers, although at this point it’s well past the trailblazer stage.  But it’s still facing some challenges that more mature digital ad channels have largely addressed, such as applying frequency caps to limit how often the same person sees the same ad.  Google just knocked a few more bushes out of the way with a feature to control frequency across multiple CTV apps, rather than separately for each app.

Coincidence or conspiracy?  Samba.TV just reported that duplicated impressions are growing on linear TV, resulting in both wasted ad spend and annoyed consumers.  In fact, 97% of linear impressions reach the same 55% of households.  Samba’s main message is that advertisers should spend more on non-linear TV to reach a broader audience and, presumably, reduce duplication.

Off in another portion of the media forest, the communications platform vendors keep building their own empires.  The latest news is that messaging vendor Gupshup has purchased cloud communications platform Knowlarity.  The deal gives GupShup new capabilities for cloud telephony, contact centers, AI-powered chatbots, and speech analytics.  The combination of cloud communication platforms in marketing and customer experience applications probably deserves more attention than it’s been getting.

Rudderstack is usually careful to call itself a data pipeline tool that will “turn your warehouse into a customer data platform”, although their latest press release says they’re “the warehouse-first, customer data platform built for developers”.   We say they’re definitely a pipeline because CDPs are by definition packaged software, not developer tools, and because they don’t control the cloud data warehouse itself.  Whatever you call them, they a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $82 million.

Some people might confuse Acxiom with a CDP, although they are quite clear their business is selling customer information.  They just announced an integration with CDP Treasure Data, which will use Acxiom’s identity capabilities to help customers build their own identity graphs.  Acxiom has deals with other CDPs, although this integration might be deeper than most.

If there’s a third bit of CDP news today, I missed it.  So I’ll give you this Emplifi survey reminding you the customer experience is really important.  It’s a familiar song but bears repeating: more than half of consumers would pay more than 5% extra for outstanding CX, and poor CX effectively ties with poor product as a reason to leave a brand.  I shouldn’t be surprised that more people want to communicate with brands through social media (22%) than email (19%) or telephone (16%), but I was.