CDP Institute

CDP value depends on delivering unified customer data, according to the CDP Institute’s latest member survey.  That’s less obvious than it sounds: martech satisfaction was much higher among companies that had unified data but no CDP, than companies with a CDP and no unified data.  Companies with unified data and a CDP were happiest of all.  Download for more insights into CDP success rates, problems, and best practices.

If you don’t like the CDP Institute’s survey, you can read this CMO research from GfK.  They asked different questions but the answers still rhyme: lack of systems to connect data silos ranked as the top barrier to achieving full data potential, cited by 64% of North American CMOs, and 69% listed data management as the leading obstacle to data access.  Global CMOs had somewhat different answers.

Gartner also has a new CMO study.  Their anti-conventional wisdom is: most marketers believe they should collaborate with other departments when building their digital roadmap, but results are actually better when marketers act independently.  I think the other findings were less surprising but the jargon was too thick to be sure.

I won’t sugarcoat this, Dear Reader: this CMO Council survey for SAS finds consumers rank personalized offers 12th on their list of 14 brand loyalty factors, while marketers rank it fourth.  There’s clearly an opportunity to benefit from closer alignment.  Another cause for alarm: the top three CX challenges are all about data integration but only one of the top seven tech investments aims to improve it.  On the bright side, that investment is CDPs.

It sometimes feels that content moderation is like the weather: subject of much talk but little action.  Cinder aims to change that with a unified platform that will let moderation teams operate more efficiently than the usual spreadsheets, queries, and Word docs.  The company has raised $14 million to date.

This IAB Tech Lab announcement bounces from prosaic (“Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, also called outdoor advertising”) to historical (“the medium is ancient, from cave paintings to signposts”) to poetical (“this may be something as ethereal as brightening up the dark skies”).  So there’s something here for everyone, even if you don’t care about the actual news.  If you do care: they’ve extended the OpenRTB standard to include elements unique to Digital Out of Home ads.

Salesforce has released the Genie Customer Data Cloud, essentially an enterprise-wide CDP that serves data to all Salesforce products.  The Salesforce CDP still exists; it uses the same infrastructure but is limited to marketing.  They tout connectors with external systems, including no-copy data exchange with Snowflake, but key parts of that are not yet delivered.

CDP Relay42 is expanding its cross-device identity matching capabilities through a partnership with digitalAudience, which does that sort of thing.  More specifically, they can activate external audiences through privacy-safe matches against company data, or enrich the company’s own data with external information.  Look-alike modeling, data clean room, deterministic matching: it’s a buzzword bingo bonanza.

One problem with using external data is the quality from different sources is wildly inconsistent.  Truthset Data Collective is aiming to tame that beast by scoring different sources against a verified standard, using hashed email address as a primary identifier.  Initial participants include Epsilon, Alliant, Data Axle, Stirista, and Verisk.  Participants don’t share data with each other, so files are just scored, not corrected.

Let’s start with good news today: Deloitte Digital reports that personalization leaders were nearly twice as likely as laggards to have exceeded 2021 revenue goals.  The bad news is only about 40% of brands can deliver the types of personalization that consumers want.  Worse news is 74% of brands lack the staff skills needed for effective personalization.

Back to good news: Privatar found that 49% of data leaders ranked targeting for marketing as the most important data driven project, beating perpetual favorites like operational efficiency and cost optimization (both at 43%).  Less good: 48% said their data investments have not delivered desired results and 71% have limited data access due to government regulations.

More bad news: just 13% of decision-makers told Hewlett Packard Enterprise they treat data strategy is a key part of corporate strategy.  Even within IT, nearly half said the budget never (28%) or occasionally (20%) includes data initiatives.  But their hearts are in the right place: top goals for data initiatives are sales growth (30%), innovation (28%) and customer experience (24%).