CDP Institute

Nobody ever had too much fun, say the country song writers.    But apparently they can have too much data.  This Oracle study finds 91% of business leaders say their success has been limited by the growing number of data sources, and 73% say lack of trust in data has prevented them from making any decisions at all.

Having data isn’t all bad, of course.  Demand Metric and AlignBI report that 68% of star performers have a complete or near-complete view of their customers, compared with just 18% of under performers.  Trust is an even bigger differentiator: 71% of star performance trust their data compared with just 15% of under performers.  Much more here on metrics, technology, staffing, and other details.

Here’s still more on customer data: CMO Council finds that it’s co-owned by sales and marketing at 36% of companies, while it’s in separate silos at 25%, owned by a separate function in 18%, owned primarily by marketing at 13% and by sales at 8%.  Just 39% are investing in a data warehouse or CDP, although fragmented technology is the biggest obstacle to better sales-marketing alignment.

Data clean room vendor Habu has added a native integration with Google Cloud BigQuery, making it easier for companies share data without revealing sensitive information.  Habu and BigQuery already have lots of other integrations, so this isn’t all that exciting.  But it does illustrate the continued growth of clean rooms and of customer data-related options in BigQuery.

One mark of a maturing tech category is that industry-specialist vendors emerge.  Right on cue, we have news from Optable, a data clean room specializing in advertising applications.  They just raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

Disney Advertising announced its own data clean room last October and added new features last month.  You can reasonably assume it’s powering their new deal with Kroger’s retail media network, which will let advertisers use Kroger data to target Disney streaming TV audiences on Hulu and to measure advertising results.

With all the excitement about AI taking over from humans, using no-code systems to make human work easier seems a bit old-fashioned. But people are here to stay, at least for a while. So let’s note that Tealium has just introduced Data Connect, which lets users build batch data import processes from over 1,000 sources without coding.

Don’t get me started on misuse of the term “composable” by some software vendors. But the label does apply properly Rally, whose ecommerce checkout component offers direct integrations with major ecommerce platforms and true “headless” components for other products.  They just raised a $12 million Series A.

APIs are the “A” in MACH, the architecture checklist that defines true composable systems.  This Nylas survey shows why APIs matter: half (53%) of the developers who responded said they could build an email integration in one to five months to build without using APIs, but Nylas’ own experience shows it really takes one year with three developers working on the project. It goes a lot quicker if an API is used instead.

Third-party cookie deprecation lets Google please privacy advocates while harming competitors.  Lest the competitive benefits become too clear, the company is eager to show that advertisers can get acceptable results from alternatives like contextual targeting, interest-based cohorts, and publishers’ first-party data.  It just released a test concluding exactly that: ad campaigns without third party cookies performed only a little worse than those using cookies. (Details here.) They mention but don’t stress that the test doesn’t consider lost measurement or retargeting.

Google has a lot on its collective mind, from renaming its FLEDGE ad targeting API (now Protected Audience API) to watching another nine states join the anti-trust lawsuit   filed by eight other states and federal Department of Justice.   But they still had time to join the verification parade with a new, blue badge for advertisers.  The spread of verification seems to reflect a broad social worry about knowing who to trust, but maybe I’m over-thinking.

What must worry Google above all is the decline in search marketing itself.  You’ll recall we reported last week that search’s share of U.S. Internet ad spend has been falling.  Today I’ll add this Jungle Scout report that people are starting their online shopping searches less with “search engines” (presumably mostly Google) and Amazon, and more with Walmart and TikTok.  Yikes!