CDP Institute

This Ascend2 report on data-driven marketing holds some surprises.  Personalization (46%) turns out rank behind customer experience (58%) as the most important trend for the next year, while predictive analytics (28%) is ranks lower than improved data integration (33%).  AI and machine learning are dead last at 10%.

Here’s another unexpected result: Demandbase finds that just 23% of B2B marketers see free trials as their most important tool for attracting new customers, ranking far behind interactive features including product tours (46%), interactive demos (45%) and online calculators (43%).  You may or may not be surprised that missing (59%) and dirty (56%) data are the biggest data challenges while disconnected sources are cited by just 40%.

The folks at “no-code product adoption platform” Chameleon probably know how important interactive tools are, since they make it easier for SaaS products to deploy banners, tool tips, models, checklists, walkthroughs, help searches, and similar interactions.  They just raised a $13 million Series A.   Just to be clear: Chameleon adds elements on top of a SaaS product without changing how the product itself works.

We’ve been writing recently about Amazon battling with Shopify for the business of online merchants, but Amazon is also fighting against Walmart.  The latest news from that front is Walmart’s release of new self-service tools for advertisers in its online Marketplace.  This overlaps with the retail media network wars if you’re keeping track.

Analytics technology vendor Altair just bought RapidMiner, which offers desktop and cloud machine learning tools.  The two product lines overlap but RapidMiner specializes in low-code solutions and says it has over one million users.  Price was not announced.

Adobe last week announced a $20 billion half-cash, half-stock deal to buy Figma, a web-native, collaborative graphic design platform that competes with several important Adobe products. The price is more than 200x Figma’s 2021 revenue although Adobe said it expected Figma revenue to more than quadruple to a $400 million annual run rate by the end of fiscal 2022. That’s much faster than Adobe’s current 13% growth rate although it’s still a small fraction of Adobe’s roughly $17 billion revenue.

CDP ActionIQ has decoupled its data storage and data extract features by launching HybridCompute, which can query data without first loading it into ActionIQ’s own data store.  The company has connectors in place for Snowflake, Databricks, and Teradata, and plans to add Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft Azure.   They describe the approach with the oh-so-trendy term “composable customer data stack”.

Salesforce has also just announced an integration that lets its CDP read data from Snowflake, although they prefer the term “zero copy data sharing”.  The connection operates in real time, which isn’t always the case with these relationships.

The real work in building a CDP is assembling the customer profiles, whether they reside in a data warehouse or a separate CDP database.  This hasn’t prevented reverse ETL vendor HIghtouch from championing “composable CDP” to help sell its data extraction tool.  They’ve just added some features to make their extracts more useful to marketers, including abilities to split an audience into test segments and to profile audience members.

Salesforce is warming up for next week’s Dreamforce conference with a bundle of product announcements.  Today it focused on Customer 360, which makes unified customer profiles available for applications across the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Clouds.  That may sound like a CDP, but don’t be confused: the Salesforce CDP still exists as part of the Marketing Cloud.  On second thought, it’s okay to be confused.

Amazon has several new tools for companies that sell on its platform. These include a Buy with Prime page within brand storefronts on Amazon, customizable Sponsored Brand ads, co-branded ads on Facebook and Instagram, and free email promotions to repeat, recent, and high-spend customers. But it’s not all wine and roses in Seattle: California just filed an anti-trust suit over Amazon pricing policies.

Google also offers marketing tools to its friends. The latest goodies help publishers build audience and contextual segments, matching standards set by IAB Tech Lab’s Seller Defined Audiences. They’re also giving publishers more control over what data is shared with partners and how often the same person sees an ad on an app. But there’s rain on their parade too: new class action suits in the EU and UK alleging Google reduced publishers’ ad revenue, and a rejected appeal of a $4+ billion EU fine for forcing phone manufacturers to... Read More >