CDP Institute

When martech folk have nothing else to worry about, they fret about unused software licenses.  This study from Nexthink adds fuel to that fire with data from six million customers across nine industries in twelve regions.  Bottom line: just under half of all installed software and SaaS licenses went unused.  Ay caramba!

What many marketers fear most about the end of third-party cookies is lost audience reach.  Permutive, which assembles anonymized audiences from publishers’ first-party data, is addressing that (get it?) by adding its cohorts to the Xandr Marketplace.   Barking up a neighboring tree, Disney announced it will make is own connected TV audiences available through integrations with LiveRamp and Experian audience identifiers.

Sendinblue started as a small business email platform and has since expanded to more channels and bigger clients.  They just grew a bit further by purchasing Captain Wallet, which enables marketing through mobile wallets.  Both companies are French.

Search engines began some time ago to switch from listing relevant web links to providing answers within the search results. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard will hugely accelerate the transition. This opens new challenges opportunities for search engine optimization vendors. SEO platform Conductor just strengthened its ability to deal with whatever comes next by purchasing European-based competitor Searchmetrics.

Email is an even more venerable digital medium than web search, and ultimately even more vulnerable to change from AI. In addition to the obvious opportunities for machine-written email, there’s also the prospect of machine-empowered email fraud. South Africa-based Sendmarc just raised a $7 million Series A to help to ensure senders are who they claim.

Web3 is about as ill-defined as a concept can be, but you could still bet that someone would come up with marketing technology to exploit it. Sure enough, Sesame Labs just raised a $4.5 million seed round for a platform that will combine user profiles, segmentation, messaging, and rewards on Web3 platforms.

While retail media has been an unexpected success, its sort-of opposite, social commerce, has never met expectations.  This Simplicitydx survey explores why: the biggest problem is low trust in social platforms, which means people prefer to buy directly on brand sites.  Social shopping still has a role to play in product discovery, although social won’t always receive credit if the sale is completed elsewhere.

Even ecommerce champion Amazon struggles when it tries to enter new channels.  The company has stopped expansion of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go physical grocery stores, and will close some existing stores, as it tries to find a better path to success.  Another reflection of Amazon’s troubles: it fell from first place in dunnhumby’s latest ranking of grocery leaders.

Another data clean room no longer qualifies as news.  But in case you’re keeping track, Acxiom just announced a cloud-based data clean room powered by Snowflake.  Side note: Acxiom’s site makes it virtually impossible to reject cookies.

ChatGPT is reportedly the fastest growing Web app ever, passing 100 million active users in just over two months.  How cool is that?  Cool enough that Google is releasing something similar – the Bard chatbot – “in the coming weeks”.  They promise many more AI-enabled applications to come.

CDP Meiro has added a native mobile push capability.  The system already supports web banners, and the vendor plans to add other delivery channels later this year.  CDP vendors adding delivery capabilities is one of the trends that we’re tracking.

Egypt-based CRM vendor Gameball just raised a $3.5 million seed round.  The product launched in 2020 and has more than 1,500 customers.  Gameball is targeted at ecommerce businesses and includes loyalty, analytics, and messaging.