CDP Institute

Business users create 70% of all no-code marketing workflows, compared with fewer than half built by business users in other departments, Workato reports.  On the other hand, marketing operations rank just seventh among most commonly automated processes, and sales and marketing departments account for just 13% of automations, well behind finance and accounting (26%), IT (25%) and data ops (15%).  Make of this what you will.

The top technical challenge facing most marketers today is loss of customer identity information.  Emodo found that more 80% of C-level marketers have seen a decline in campaign effectiveness and audience size as a result of privacy changes.  Two-thirds don’t expect the walled gardens to solve the problem, but many are looking to better creative, new channels, and AI-based solutions for help.

This Ad-Lib study also finds that marketers hope better creative can overcome privacy constraints.  Scaling up creative capability was the most commonly cited opportunity for improving return on advertising, while greater creative “acumen” came in second.   Opportunity notwithstanding, actual plans for adapting to cookie loss placed leveraging data (52%) and developing alternative ad channels (33%) ahead of generating more relevant creative (32%) or investing more with platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon (25%).

Martech financing dropped substantially in the second quarter of 2022, according to this LUMA analysis.  The number of merger and acquisition transactions fell slightly compared with the previous quarter (41 vs 45) but deals over $100 million were down 50%.  Stock prices for public martech firms fell 35%, which is even worse than the 22% drop in NASDAQ as a whole. Lots of details and reference data here if you want it.

When public markets pull back, private investors often step in to scoop up perceived bargains.  Private equity firm Clearhaven Partners just did that, spending something over $100 million for a majority stake in video creation and personalization platform SundaySky.  Sunday Sky just published a study showing how marketers struggle to create videos the old-fashioned way.

Don’t confuse a drop in martech funding with a drop in martech investment.  Most studies show markets continue to invest at the same or higher levels as last year.  For example, Gartner’s widely-cited CMO Spend survey found over-all marketing budgets rose sharply as a share of revenue and there was no meaningful change in the percentage spent on martech.

National CineMedia sells ads in movie theaters, which you may not think are very targetable.  But they just teamed with Neustar to enable more audience identification.  More intriguing, they also inked a deal with ElementalTV to convert in-theater ads into interactive shoppable content.

Movie theaters may be a new frontier for ecommerce, but shopping on social media is now almost standard.  Pinterest hasn’t been a leader but they did just add a Shopping API that lets merchants to upload their catalogs.  They also made it easier to tag products, upload videos, and put a shopping tab on business profiles.  Purchases are still completed outside of Pinterest in Shopify or other platforms.

Voice assistants are another new shopping channel.  Or maybe not so new: Vixen Labs reports that nearly half (48%) of U.S. consumers have made a purchase through a voice device, and even more use it for other tasks such as searching for information or tracking a shipment.  Fun fact: people in the U.S. are twice as likely to be comfortable using voice in public as people in Germany.

You may have noticed that social media trends appear faster than u cn rd ths.  It’s easy enough to find rising keywords, but mapping them to broader topics has traditionally required slow-paced human effort.  Social listening platform Synthesio is speeding that up with Topic Modeling, which uses AI to assign conversations to new categories as they emerge.

Verve Group, which has assembled a herd of mostly-mobile ad buying and selling tools, has added self-service mobile ad buying platform Dataseat to its flock.  Like other Verve properties, Dataseat specializes in placing ads without relying on customer or device identifiers that are rapidly vanishing due to privacy improvements.  Dataseat’s approach uses contextual signals to optimize campaigns.

A Nielsen study that finds marketers spend too little on advertising might seem too self-serving to mention.   But while the headline on this report is that 50% of campaigns spend too little to get optimal results, the unstated implication – that marketers should run fewer programs– is worth some thought.  Bigger eggs, fewer baskets.