CDP Institute

Customer experience leaders are nearly three times as likely as laggards to have a CDP (55% vs 20%), according to this Medallia study.  Don’t be too impressed: leaders are similarly more likely use marketing automations, workflow automation, voice of customer research, and contact center agency productivity tools.  Even less surprising: leaders have better business results.

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Marketing Authority (CMA) has noticed that Google owns the largest demand side platform, ad exchange, and ad server, and wonders whether Google exploits that for competitive advantage.  So far, they’ve discovered the related technology is “known as the ‘ad tech stack’” and “is important because millions of people across the UK use websites that rely on advertising revenue to offer high-quality, free content.”  Impressive.

You know TikTok is hot, but did you know it’s expected to attract more time than YouTube among adult U.S. consumers this year?   If you’re a marketer itching for a piece of that action, you may also want to know you can now publish TikTok content using Hootsuite, Sprinkler, Emplify, Sprout Social, Khoros, Brandwatch, and other systems.   Also, they’ve added a WooCommerce integration that can synch entire store catalogs to TikTok, and use the TikTok Pixel to track ad results.

Every self-respecting SaaS application wants an app marketplace of its own.  Payment platform Stripe just reached that milestone, launching a marketplace with integrations including Hubspot, Mailchimp, Intercom, Dropbox, and Docusign.  Users can access data from those tools within their Stripe dashboard and update the tools’ own files with data from Stripe.

Retail media has quickly moved from quirky curiosity to major channel.  If you’ve been avoiding the topic, this dunnhumby report offers a good way to catch up.  The report says retail media could be worth $50 billion this year, putting it in the same ballpark as direct mail ($43 billion) and linear TV ($63 billion)

Shoppable video is the mirror image of retail media: instead of selling someone else’s ads on a retail website, it lets companies convert their own website into a retailer.  Maybe that makes no sense, but the symmetry is appealing.  What’s even more appealing is $150 million, which is how much livestream platform Firework just raised in a Series B, brining total funding to $369 million.

Google announced a range of advertising improvements at its Google Live conference.  Changes include Zapier integration for CRM connections, expanded cross-channel attribution analytics and testing, auto-created responsive search ads, and connected TV campaigns targeted against affinition, in-market, and demographic audiences.  Several other goodies too, if you’re interested.

Product analytics vendor Amplitude has launched a CDP called, well, Amplitude CDP.  The company already captures customer-level behavior information to track product use, so extending to a CDP isn’t as much of a stretch as it might seem.  Viewed from the CDP perspective, it’s a good example of CDP use outside of marketing.

Sports marketing is another specialized area that has attracted CDPs in recent months.  Sports app vendor FanReach has launched a new system with advanced audience segmentation, multi-variant messaging, and personalization.  It might not be a CDP but it would certainly make good use of one.

This Adverity survey finds that that as many CMOs say data hinders creativity (42%) as say it helps (41%).  A similar proportion (43%) say their teams spend more time collecting data than using it.  I think the intended lesson is that people should buy tools like Adverity to make data collection easier, but maybe some people have given up on this whole “data-driven decisions” thing altogether.

Data integration platform Fivetran also finds companies are struggling with data: 82% of Enterprise Resource Platform (ERP) users say they’re making decisions based on stale data and 85% say this is leading to lost revenue.  Just 23% say they have real-time access to ERP data even though 86% say they need it.  Say, do you think Fivetran can help?

Back in sales and marketing land, 33% of executives say that lack of unified customer data is a top challenge to providing exceptional customer experience.  Only poor communications (46%) and misalignment (42%) between teams rank higher.  Poor alignment is the biggest obstacle to creating a unified customer view, ranking ahead of technology and data quality.