CDP Institute

Retailers are making progress in their personalization programs: they’re finally more likely to personalize product recommendations (52%) than show customer names (49%), finds Retail TouchPoints.  Other interesting trends are growing use of traditional media for acquisition, up from 29% in 2021 to 51% in 2022, and more purchase discounts for customer retention, from 55% last year to 73%.  Nearly two-thirds (63%) used a CDP to support their personalization program – more than any other technology.

Marketers have made less progress with measurement than personalization. Measured reports that more than 80% of direct-to-consumer marketers rely on click-based data from websites and media platforms, even though they know it’s unreliable. Near-infinitesimal fractions use gold standard methods such as incrementality experiments (4.7%) or multi-touch attribution (2.5%). Speaking of which, start-up Incrmntal just raised $4.1 million to make incremental measurement easier.

It’s not your imagination: good men (and women) are hard to find. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 77% of marketers said there’s a talent shortage in their organization.  In bad news for English majors everywhere, data and analytics skills top the list while creative and social media roles are at the bottom.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome.  They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment.  The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.

Audience measurement is a challenge across all channels, even when cookies aren’t involved.  Nielsen in particular has struggled to keep up with TV audiences, as delivery methods expanded beyond linear broadcasts to streaming networks, mobile devices, and on-line video.  Their latest extension is “Four-Screen Ad Deduplication”, which adds deduplicated YouTube viewers to its Total Ad Ratings data.

Out-of-home advertising includes not just billboards but video displays in retail stores and other public locations.  Geopath specializes in measuring those channels.  They’ve just done a deal with in-store audio ad network Stingray to expand their coverage of out- of-home audio ads, addressing a problem you may never have even considered.

Our recent Industry Update found a slowdown in CDP vendor funding, but Cordial is bucking the trend.  They just announced a $50 million Series C, bringing total funding to $73.6 million.  We classify Cordial as a Delivery CDP, since their system sends messages.  Channels include email, SMS, mobile apps, and websites.

Video and connected TV adtech vendor Tremor International has purchased Amobee, which offers its own cross-channel ad platform.  The seller was Singtel and the price was $239 million, considerably less than the $321 million that Singtel paid for Tremor in 2012.  But that was long ago and far away.

Back to CDP land: loyalty platform Annex Cloud announced a partnership with Delivery CDP Ometria.  Annex Cloud also has integration with Tealium, mParticle, Bloomreach, and 100+ non-CDPs.

Industry-specific CDP packages are one of the industry’s major trends.  Tealium advanced in that direction today with release of Tealium for Pharma, which includes tight integrations with widely-used pharma tech vendors Veeva, Doceree, and DMD.  The package also includes pharma-specific data models, segmentations, and use cases.

Industry-specific packages are one type of specialization; function-specific packages are another.  Microsoft nicely illustrated the point last week by launching a digital contact center platform, a mash-up of existing products including Dynamics 365, Teams, Power Platform and conversational AI system Nuance.  Microsoft announced its Nuance acquisition in April 2021 although the deal only closed in March 2022.

The only way for companies that serve a single industry to grow is to offer a broader product.  Publisher-oriented content management vendor ePublishing just took that route by buying Multipub, which offers subscription management tools to the same market.  And that’s your strategy lecture for the day, Dear Reader.