CDP Institute

Surfeit of surveys? Plethora of polls?  Rash of reports?  Any way you slice it, we’ve been publishing a lot of research recently, so I’m glad to feature business news today instead. We’ll start with a new data clean room from AppsFlyer, the first product in their previously-announced Privacy Cloud.

Next, we have a $25 million Series B for CreativeX, whose “creative data platform” analyzes brand images and video for quality, consistency, diversity, and regulatory compliance.  The actual metrics are objective items like aspect ratio, video length, and subtitles, so it’s more about meeting standards than fostering creative genius.  Which is fine: you need both.

Finally, Apple has extended Apple Pay with Apple Pay Later, its version of the increasingly popular installment billing option.  It’s a sound strategic move, encouraging both consumers and retailers to give more business to Apple.  But it’s worth doing for the product name alone.

Marketers are taking a gloomy view of the impact of privacy changes, according to this Modern Marketing Association (MMA) survey.  They expect cookie deprecation alone to reduce ROI by at least 22% and say Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) has already reduced ROI by 17%.  In response, well-prepared companies are accelerating their investment in first party data and 59% expect to invest in a CDP as part of the solution.

App developers are hit especially hard by new privacy rules, Bango reports.  The majority (59%) say they’ve already lost revenue, 62% say they have “no idea” how they’ll acquire new users after the changes are fully deployed, and 27% expect to shut down entirely as a result.  You won’t be surprised that Bango proposes a proprietary solution, something it calls “purchase behavior targeting”.

Budgets are shifting to search and social channels as privacy changes make display ads less effective.  Nielsen finds that social influencers are much more trusted (71%) by consumers than social media ads or search ads (tied at 36%).  The spectacular rise of TikTok is one result.  Read the report for more on influencer types, demographics, locations, and engagement rates.

Customer Data Platforms are the most common tech investment priority for retailers, listed by 61%, CommerceNext reports.  The focus reflects a broader finding that data management has replaced data collection as the greatest challenge to leveraging first party data.  Lots more here about shifting media investments, performance measurement, privacy, and other topics.

Cloud databases are growing, but the majority of data remains in private data centers, according to this Denodo survey of data professionals.   Security, compliance, and governance is the top barrier to cloud adoption (72%).  Just 17% say they’re currently using cloud systems for data integration, analytics, and management, although another 29% are considering it.

“Transparency” is the most overused buzzword in advertising, says to this Mediaocean survey, followed closely by “cookieless/privacy-safe”.  “Customer Data Platform” doesn’t even make the list, which feels like a failure on our part.  More substantively, the study finds that marketers are more worried about the impact of cookie loss on their measurement capabilities than on marketing results.  Interesting.

The CDP industry is spending a lot of time debating whether IT teams should build their own systems or buy commercial software.  Capital One Financial Corp has taken ‘build’ to an extreme by letting other companies buy systems it originally built for itself.  The first product offered by Capital One Software is a data management tool for Snowflake.   It’s probably not a trend but if it is, you heard it here first.

You probably don’t need more convincing that shopping on social media is A Thing, Dear Reader.  But I’m still intrigued at how quickly the industry has hopped aboard that bandwagon.  So here’s news that Pinterest has just bought THE YES, which uses AI to create a personalized fashion shopping feed based on users’ preferences for brand, style, and size.

We all knew the day was coming when humans would be helpers to robots instead of the other way around.  Chatbot maker Gupshup has taken that one step closer by purchasing OneDirect, which helps human customer service agents handle the calls that chatbots can’t manage.  Gupshup doesn’t position it as humans helping chatbots but they’re not fooling anyone.