CDP Institute

It’s a slow news day, Dear Reader, so let’s look at changes in the top 100 customer loyalty rankings published by Brand Keys.  The biggest loser is Elon Musk’s X/Twitter, whose shenanigans have earned a drop from 47th to 92nd place.  Tito’s vodka rose from 87th to 34th, making it an even bigger winner than Barbie-fueled Mattel, which went from 88th to 42nd.  Somehow that seems right.

Operative’s State of Digital Advertising 1H 2023 report may not have the snappiest title ever, but it highlights why publishers care so much about identifying their users: advertising cost per thousand for identified users was 2x the CPM for unidentified users on Safari and 3X on Google Chrome.  According to the report, publishers are pulling their low-value anonymous inventory into private channels where they can bundle it with higher value inventory to gain higher revenue over-all.

This study by Smart Insights on digital marketing practices offers the rather sad news that about half of companies are stuck in the lowest maturity stages.  Lack of qualified staff is the biggest obstacle to improvement, followed by low investment in platform integration.  Not-so-fun fact: just 11% of respondents have a well-defined martech stack while 48% have no structured approach to selecting and integrating martech.

This report from WordPress VIP offers specifics on vendor market share in several categories, including CDP.  The figures seem a little unlikely: CDPs present at nearly 90% of companies, with market share at 55% for Salesforce, 29% for Segment, 22% for Tealium, 16% for Lytics, and 15% for Blueconic.  The main focus is on content marketing: did you know that 86% of companies measure content impact?

Reporting on martech stacks seems to be in fashion.  This Snowflake report lists the most popular partners connected to its cloud data warehouse, divided into ten categories. Customer data activation, which includes CDPs, ranks second with 27.6% growth.  Sadly, they don’t report product-by-product details.

Orbee offers auto dealers “middleware [that] integrates all of a dealership’s data sources into a Customer Data Platform.”  We’re not sure they tick all the RealCDP boxes but they definitely offer analytical and marketing capabilities. They just raised a $4 million Series A.

Venture funding is still hard to come by, but it helps if you’re already a mature company.  Take VideoAmp, which just raised a $150 million Series G on top of a previous $300 million.  They compete with Nielsen by collecting viewing data from nearly 40 million U.S. households and using it for advertising audience measurement, media planning, and campaign optimization.

Pixis is another company with a late stage round: in their case, a $85 million Series C1, bringing total funding to $209 million.  Pixis uses AI to develop target audiences, create content, and optimize ad campaigns.  Or, as they put, they’re a “codeless AI infrastructure company for marketing”.

“Made for Advertising” (MFA) sites have emerged as a problem that advertisers didn’t even know they had.  DoubleVerify is on case, offering an extension of its brand safety solution to flag and let advertisers avoid MFA sites.  Citing industry confusion on the topic, DoubleVerify helpfully defines MFA sites as “those whose sole purpose is to deliver advertisements.”

TikTok has finally launched its U.S. e-commerce product, TikTok Shop, which will offer live video shopping, shoppable ads, and affiliate programs for creators.  This follows months of testing amid concerns that social commerce has struggled in the U.S. even though it’s wildly successful in China and elsewhere.

This members-only IAB report documents the growth and frustrations of the retail media market.  Criteo is trying to help with a new buying platform, Commerce Max DSP, that combines access to onsite and instore media buys.  They’ve supplemented it with a trio of tools based on previous acquisitions of Mabaya (marketplace tactics and formats), Brandcrush (offline inventory), and Gradient (insight and data tools).

The U.S. Justice Department’s three year old antitrust suit against Google finally reached trial yesterday.  Of all the suits facing Google, this is the big one, focused squarely on its dominance of the search advertising market and possibly requiring a break-up of its business should Google lose.  You can expect several more years of fun before anything is resolved.