CDP Institute

Yesterday was both Cinco de Mayo and World Password Day, which probably means a lot of passwords are now set to Taco. Microsoft, Apple, and Google marked the day ironically, by announcing joint plans to support the password-free sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium. Security experts have come to regard passwords as inherently insecure, preferring hardware- or biometric-based alternatives.

Security improvements (and possibly tacos) are also on the menu at omnichannel marketing platform ActiveCampaign, which just purchased DMARC Digests, an email authentication and monitoring service. ActiveCampaign also bought transactional email service Postmark. The deals have little in common beyond expanding the scope of ActiveCampaign’s offerings.

The folks at agency holding company Publicis Groupe no doubt care about security, but their latest acquisition is ecommerce analytics software company Profitero. It’s unusual for an ad agency to own straight-up commercial software, but Publicis must have decided that Profitero’s predictive analytics for product, content, search, pricing, and other decisions is worth the reported €200 million ($210 million) price.

For one brief, if delusional, moment, marketers thought adtech had made accurate performance measurement a reality.  Loss of third-party cookies and device IDs shattered the illusion.  The gold-standard alternative has always been controlled experiments to measure incremental results, but that’s been too hard to execute.  Measured just raised $21 million to make it easier.  On average, they find 40% of media investments are ineffective.

TV manufacturers offer a new path to attribution enlightenment.  We reported last week that Samsung had launched a product to track ad consumption, measure results, and make incremental buys to meet coverage targets.  Vizio just launched something similar.

Third-party cookies aren’t entirely dead yet, at least according to TikTok.  They just added a requirement for advertisers who use their site conversion pixel to pass them third-party cookie data, improving TikTok’s own targeting and attribution capabilities.   It seems pretty retro but maybe TikTok knows something the rest of us do not.

B2B CDP Leadspace today announced Leadspace Studio, an “all-in-one, AI-driven solution for sales and marketing to find, create and accelerate pipeline with the highest probability of conversion”. The offering combines predictive models, third-party prospect data, AI-driven segmentation, and integration with CRM, marketing automation, and delivery systems. Leadspace also announced a free “Pipeline Impact Report” that will analyze a sample of your data and return reports on your Total Available Market, data health, and recommended marketing programs.

B2B martech vendor Integrate has added social media marketing to its existing stable of digital, event, and content syndication tools. Social marketing features include loading target lists to LinkedIn, full-service LinkedIn ad campaign creation, integration with LinkedIn lead generation forms, and enhancement of leads with external data.   The company also expanded its cross-channel analytics capabilities.

If you want a broader perspective, B2B Marketing Expo and friends released a survey that covers B2B marketer objectives, tech investments, budget allocations, training, and mental health. CDP shows up as a relatively low priority, recently bought by 13% of respondents and planned for near-acquisition by 10%. Marketing automation (22%), video marketing (17%), and account based marketing (15%) rank higher in purchase plans, while data management platforms, digital events, and ecommerce fell off the list entirely.

We knew that product-led marketing, such as freemium and free trials, is increasingly popular.  But we hadn’t realized that two-thirds of businesses already offer some sort of free trial – including nearly as many B2B (64%) as B2C (69%).  That’s according to Recurly, whose study also provides lots of other information on conversions, subscription plans, churn rates, payment methods, and more.

Cord-cutting is another trend that turns out to be further along than you may have realized.  Pixability reports that 41% of U.S. consumers say they’ve already dropped their cable subscription and another 20% plan to leave within the next year.  That would leave just one-quarter of consumers watching linear TV.  Marketing dollars are sure to follow.

Is the metaverse also growing faster than you thought?  Probably not: CommerceNext finds that 75% of consumers have barely heard of it and just 5% visit on a regular basis.  Even that group uses it almost mostly for gaming (76%) and socializing (39%); just 30% do any shopping.  Most social commerce still takes place on the major social media platforms.