CDP Institute

In-person events are waking up from pandemic-induced hibernation.  Kaltura reports that more marketers are planning live events (42%) than virtual (40%) in 2023, a reversal from 2022, which virtual events (43%) were more common than in-person (39%).  Live, virtual, and hybrid events are each preferred for different purposes, so it’s likely we’ll continue to see a mix of all types.

Gaming grew tremendously during the pandemic, and in-game advertising grew with it.  But while one-third of gamers find the ads annoying, this Frameplay study finds that ads integrated with gameplay are much more acceptable.  Something to bear in mind as consumers gain more control over which ads they see.

However you feel about Tuesday’s U.S. election results, here’s some news we can all agree is bad: Salesforce has laid off “hundreds” of employees.  It’s another strong hint that the layoffs hitting other tech sectors will apply to martech too.  On the bright side: the figure is a tiny fraction of Salesforce’s 70,000+ employees.  Compare it to Meta laying off 11,000 people or 13% of its workforce.

Openprise has launched a “RevOps Data Automation Cloud” that unifies its measurement, funnel automation, and data orchestration solutions for marketing and sales departments.  Openprise qualifies as a CDP although they don’t use the term anywhere I can find it.

You might wonder why Capital One would invest $96 million investment in travel app Hopper, let alone why it’s relevant to this newsletter.  I’ll argue the deal is about Capital One gaining access to Hopper’s first-party data, which makes it a media play.  Hopper describes its goal as building a travel super-app with strong social commerce capabilities.

Ecommerce marketing platform Klaviyo is buying Napkin.io, which lets developers write and deploy code directly from a browser.  It’s a bit unusual for martech vendors to buy development tools, but apparently the Klaviyo folks were smitten.  It’s more low-code than no-code, but either way is aimed at making it easier to extend Klaviyo capabilities.

Consumers and marketers are eagerly jumping into the metaverse.  This Sitecore study finds that one-third of marketers already have metaverse marketing programs and 42% of consumers are present or plan to visit shortly.  “Escaping reality” ranks high on their list of reasons, and who could blame them?

Many people are more interested in mixing virtual and actual reality than entering an entirely separate metaverse.  Smart contact lens maker Mojo Vision falls into the mixed-reality group.  They just announced an app that displays Alexa shopping lists within your contact lenses.  The time and effort savings are unimaginable.  No, really, I can’t imagine any.

Salesforce last week released the eighth edition of its State of Marketing Report.  As usual, lots of interesting data.  Particular highlights: fewer companies are going beyond the regulatory minimum to protect privacy (51% vs 61% last year); the number of average marketing data sources has grown to 15 from ten last year; and technology accounts for 15% of marketing budgets.

Social commerce has had a bumpy ride recently, as consumers show reluctance to order through social media platforms where access to customer service and returns is unclear.  Snap Inc. is avoiding that issue with an integration that lets Snapchat ads point directly to BigCommerce online stores.  Could be the way to do this.

If you’re looking for something new to worry about, try “malvertising”, which is what happens when programmatic ads deliver malware.  It’s something that clean.io protects against.  Clean.io was just bought by cybersecurity firm HUMAN Security,

Those cloud data warehouses that everyone loves – looking at you, Snowflake – are apparently harder to access than you might expect.  Twilio Segment is the second CDP this week to introduce a “reverse ETL” product that pulls data out of cloud databases into Twilio’s own data store, which in turn will share it with other systems.  Segment also launched a complementary product, Profiles Sync, that moves profiles into cloud databases.