CDP Institute

The e-commerce pie isn’t shrinking but growth has slowed as the pandemic tapers down and inflation heats up.  This puts Amazon and Shopify in tighter competition.  The latest skirmish is a warning to Shopify merchants that installing Amazon’s Buy with Prime button violates the Shopify Terms of Service and could lead to fraudulent orders, stolen customer data, incorrect charges, and hair loss.  Okay, they don’t mention hair loss but I think it’s implied.

Online grocery shopping is at special risk as buyers return to squeezing melons in person.  Instacart’s response is to evolve from a shopping service to a “grocery technology company”.  They just announced their second acquisition in a week, this time of Rosie, an e-commerce platform that mostly serves independent grocers.

When the going gets tough, Meta runs away as fast as it can.  Their response to e-commerce challenges is to scale back Instagram’s shopping pages and refocus on ad sales.  The move comes one month after Meta-owned Facebook dropped its own live shopping product.

It’s sadly obvious that you can make money telling lies online, but there’s also a business in telling the truth.  Credibility rating service The Factual does that, using AI systems that rate news source credibility without attempting to check specific claims.  The eight-person company was just purchased by Yahoo, which will use it to rate online news articles.

Social media sites are often, and rightly, criticized for failing to spread misinformation.  YouTube just announced its efforts for the upcoming U.S. elections, which will focus on recommending content from authoritative sources like PBS and The Wall Street Journal, and offering “information panels” with links to voting information.  They’re also “identifying borderline content and keeping it from being widely recommended” which isn’t exactly the same as labeling or blocking it altogether.

Taboola is intercepting users before they visit any web site by placing a news feed on home screens on Samsung, Xioami, Oppo, and other smartphones.  The links will go to a web page that features advertising and then send users to the original news sources, which will be Taboola-curated reliable news sources.   This entirely avoids the challenge of moderating user-sourced content that plagues social media.

The title of this Acxiom survey says personalization but CDP is the star of the show. Download for lots of juicy info about CDP deployment, use cases, benefits, obstacles, and more. Fun fact: more companies have deployed a CDP (43%) than marketing automation (42%), loyalty system (37%) or consent manager (36%).

Martech spending in the U.S. will exceed $20 billion in 2022, according to this eMarketer forecast. Wow, that’s impressive…oh wait, it’s a tiny fraction of the $344 billion global martech spend estimated by other sources, based largely on Gartner’s well-known estimate that martech is about one-quarter of all marketing spend. Further perspective:  Salesforce alone had $26 billion in revenue last year, although not all of that would count as martech.

Marketing operations staff are responsible for running many of those martech systems. This MarketingOps report, sponsored by Knak and Adobe, finds that Adobe Marketo Engage, HubSpot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are packaged software they use most – although spreadsheets are the most popular tool of all. Integration (69%) and scalability (53%) were the most-chosen criteria for new tech, but take that with a grain of salt: apparently features were not an option in the survey.

We have lots of acquisition news today, Dear Reader, and I’m not talking about your first Pumpkin Spice Latte of the season.  Let’s start with Instacart buying pricing and promotions platform Eversight.  It’s an interesting extension as Instacart works to protect its pandemic-driven market gains in the face of new home delivery options and a return to in-store sales.

Did you know that TIME Magazine (1923) predates the first bread slicing machine (1928)?  TIME’s original business model went stale long ago, although the company has expanded its digital, video, events, and other businesses since Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife bought it in 2018.  TIME just made its first acquisition under the Benioff regime, purchasing no-code website builder Brandcast.  The tech will help TIME clients build customized microsites.

Mobile measurement platform Branch has purchased AdLibertas, a predictive data platform for mobile apps.  AdLibertas pulls together first-party data from multiple sources and uses to results to help mobile app developers track user behavior and optimize their ad programs.  It’s especially important as Apple and Google cut off the flow of third-party ad targeting and measurement data.