CDP Institute

The rise of retail media networks continues to fascinate. This ANA study is less enthusiastic than most, reporting that 85% of current advertisers feel pressured by retail partners to use their network and only 31% see it as a valuable marketing tool. Just 11% of non-users have plans to join the party.

Media agency professionals had a more positive attitude towards retail media in this Criteo survey, ranking it first in return on ad spend compared with Connected TV, audio, search, social media, and metaverse ads, although the differences are small. They particularly liked being able to tie retail media ads directly to sales results.

Return on investment is important but what about sustainability? Well, 95% of IT leaders said it’s high priority for their own companies and when picking suppliers. But 87% said they’d ultimately prioritize commercial objectives over sustainability when faced with economic challenges. Are you surprised?

Retailers are super-excited about “composable” architectures, with 91% considering it important, according to this MACH Alliance survey.  (MACH stands for Micro-Services, API-First, Cloud Native, and Headless, which is a good tech checklist for true composability.)  But just 2% say their systems are fully composable today.  The focus here is largely on in-store technology; Customer Data Platforms don’t show up in the discussion.  

The National Auto Dealers Association trade show wrapped up yesterday, leaving behind more evidence that industry-focused CDPs are growing.  Announcements included a “full-scale customer data platform” called Audience IQ from Force Marketing, and new features for the “Customer Data and Experience Platform” from DAS Technology.  DAS just changed its name from Digital Air Strike, which was so much cooler.

Raise your hand if your company’s Chief Information Officer is a “changemaker”.  Now, lower your hand if you’re a CIO yourself.  I thought so.  This Foundry report says 85% of CIOs think they’re becoming changemakers and 68% say they are leading revenue-generating initiatives.  They have a more realistic view of current priorities, listing operational efficiency and cybersecurity at the top.

Finished binging all your favorite TV series and facing a dull weekend? No worries, Dear Reader: gather some friends and take turns reading aloud from this 465 page digital global overview report from Meltwater and we are social. Some of the good parts: internet time is down 4.8%, podcast listening is up 12.7%, and there are more web pages about dogs than cats.

This GoodFirms survey focuses on digital transformation projects. It found that 78.6% of executives say they’ve already digitized their business processes and most of the rest are working on it. In an interesting distinction, improved customer experience was the top benefit cited while better marketing ranked last.

No good salesperson blames the buyer for poor results, but that doesn’t mean buyers aren’t sometimes a problem. In fact, this study from Zip found that 79% of accounting and finance professionals said their company has challenges in its B2B purchasing process. One reason: 48% say their firm requires at least six cross-functional approvals for a new software or vendor purchase.

Data access vendor Hightouch has released Personalization API, which provides real-time access to cloud databases.  Don’t get too excited: the data will only be as current as the underlying data warehouse, which is rarely itself updated in real time.  And, as the company notes in a very interesting accompanying blog post, the data is actually loaded into an intermediate “distributed, multi-region data store”, not read from the warehouse directly.

This IAB report provides an in-depth look at the super-hot topic of Data Clean Rooms.   Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said they had one, with privacy and data activation the main applications.  The report cautions that clean rooms take a lot of money (average $376,000 per year), staff (49% have six or more dedicated employees) and time (up to two years to deploy).   Also stats here on CDP deployment (72%), cost ($437,000 per year) and satisfaction (60%).

I no longer use Twitter, but apparently it has become the “free-for-all hellscape” that Elon Musk promised to avoid.  Advertisers who support this can limit the damage to their brands with new services from Double Verify and Integral Ad Science.  Both measure the content that’s adjacent to brand ads, although they’re only reporting after the damage is done.