CDP Institute

The relaxed post-New Year’s vibe has now worn off, so we can go back to obsessing about third-party cookies.  Programmatic ad buying platform The Trade Desk is helping with Galileo, which lets marketers upload customer lists from CDPs or other sources, apply the Unified ID 2.0 identifier, and use it to track members across audiences.  It’s less comprehensive than tracking with third-party cookies, but probably as close as we’ll get with current technology.

Data clean rooms are another not-quite-substitute for third-party cookies, offering a way to share limited amounts of data.  Pinterest is barking up that tree with a new LiveRamp partnership.  It will let advertisers upload their customer lists to the LiveRamp clean room, where they can be matched against the Pinterest member file to target Pinterest ads against people on both lists.

Third-party cookies may be vanishing, but other third-party data is more available than ever. Consumer purchase data compiler IRI reinforced the point with separate deals to (a) provide Meta with brand- and product-level sales data to measure results of Facebook and Instagram ads  and (b) offer 1,500 IRI-built individual-level audience segments to TV ad buyers through Experian.

The wave of tech industry layoffs rolled closer to CDP-land with news of a 10% reduction in staff at Salesforce.  The company blamed over-hiring in anticipation of growth that is no longer anticipated.  CDP vendors have largely avoided public layoffs, although we do hear scattered tales of unannounced reductions.

Dentsu-owned Merkle is selling its Response Management Group (RMG), which offers direct response data capture, customer care, and fulfillment, primarily to non-profit and government clients. The 600-person RMG was part of Merkle’s original business, which has now evolved into a 14,000-employee tech-based customer experience agency. Buyer is Moore, a 5,000-person specialist in fund-raising marketing and production.

Publicis Groupe-owned Epsilon also started in direct mail fund-raising and later became the customer marketing technology hub for a giant agency holding company.  In a nice bit of symmetry, Epsilon is adding mid-market website personalization tool Yieldify, which Publicis just purchased.

Connectors between CDPs and cloud databases are becoming too common to mention.  But how would you know they’re common if we don’t mention them?  So I’ll slip in this news that Lytics has integrated its reverse ETL tool Cloud Connect with the Databricks cloud database.

You can think of Shopify as a sort of anti-Amazon, in the sense of helping merchants compete with the ecommerce giant.  This implies helping with more than just order processing.  Along those lines, they just added Audiences, which lets merchants send customer lists to Meta and Google to help find new customers through look-alike modeling.

Embattled measurement giant Nielsen has swatted back at competitors with the U.S. launch of Nielsen ONE Ads, its long-awaited tool to report on deduplicated audiences across linear TV, connected TV, desktop and mobile.  Reports include live metrics for digital campaigns, data from Nielsen panels, and direct publisher integrations.  Future extensions will include results measurement, based on customer behavior data, and content metrics.

Let’s continue looking at story lines for 2023.  We’ll start with digital transformation.  This CMO Council report paints a mixed picture: 89% of respondents think digital transformation is achieving good results but less than 12% see their enterprise leaders as highly strategic and adept at deploying new technologies.

The new year will surely see a continued focus on improving customer experience. This Intercom survey reinforces the fundamental point that consumers will walk away from companies that treat them poorly. This Vonage survey confirms that result and gives nerdly fascinating detail on consumer contact preferences by age, region, channel, and purpose.

Another continuing story is marketers’ quest for better media measurement, in particular for connected TV and other video channels.  Along those lines, smart TV audience measurement vendor VideoAmp has just announced a deal to measure cross-screen campaign results for Warner Brothers Discovery.