CDP Institute

Global marketing agency Omnicom announced an $835 million deal for Flywheel Digital, which offers digital commerce products and services for operations, media execution, and market intelligence.  Interestingly, the purchase announcement goes out of its way to promise that Flywheel’s “product and transaction data will be connected to Omni’s audience and behavioral data to provide unmatched insights and analytics.”   Sounds like they care more about the data than the services.

Social media influencers are the top Direct-to-Consumer marketing channel (71%), well ahead of streaming TV (59%), retail media (40%) and SMS (28%), according to this Klaviyo study.  As a result, third-party data (84%) vastly outranks first-party (15%) and second-party (0%) data for 2023, although 67% expect second-party to be important in 2024.  Lack of a single customer view is the top tech stack challenge (73%) even though (or maybe because) just 13% report having a CDP or CRM system in place.

Sharing data on the Internet is like giving car keys to a teenager: once you’ve done it, you’ll never track where they’ve gone.  Channeling anxious parents everywhere, a coalition of researches from MIT, Cohere for AI, and 11 other institutions has released Data Provenance Explorer,  which audits the contents of nearly 2,000 widely used training data sets.  You won’t be surprised that there’s a lot of missing information and unauthorized use; you may be surprised how often they warn that licenses limited to non-commercial use will stifle growth of new... Read More >

Amazon continues to grow its advertising business, reporting a 26% increase to $12 billion last week.  They also made several ad-related announcements at their Unboxed conference last week.  These included a new data clean room for publishers (in beta), self-service ad buying for streaming TV, and AI-based image generation (also in beta).

CabinetM maintains a massive database of over 15,000 martech products linked to company martech stacks.  Their quarterly report offers a few trends: new product announcements and features announcements are down 49% and 22%, respectively, martech investment was down 39%, and acquisitions were up 19%.  The report does highlight major announcements by product category.

It takes a special kind of person to get excited at the thought of programmatic ad buying for linear TV.  If that’s you, here’s news that AMC Networks has made that possible for its AMC, BBC America and We TV cable networks.  If that’s not you, well, here’s a kitten.

Marketing leaders are slightly more likely than mainstream companies to use a single platform (41% vs 36%) and slightly less likely to use multiple technologies (43% vs 50%), finds this Econsultancy study for Adobe.  Then again, both groups are more likely to use multiple technologies than a single platform.  So confusing!  Most do agree that they don’t want to build their own: just 16% of leaders and 15% of mainstream choose that option.

Contextual ad targeting is often offered as an alternative to third-party cookies and device IDs, although most tests show performance is middling at best. But that’s when context is based on publisher-declared metadata, according to this study from Alliance for Video-level Contextual Advertising (ACVA), who just might be a bit biased.  Still, they found when context was classified using AI systems, viewer attention and recall grow by 2x to 4x.

Did someone say, “I’m tired of studies about AI in marketing; what about AI in sales enablement?”  I sure hope so, since Seismic just published one.  Exactly 50% say they use AI-powered tools in sales enablement, which might strike you as low or high depending on your expectations.  But nearly everyone who has deployed AI reports they achieved their intended outcomes (92% to 94%).  Top implementation challenges are integration (45%), understanding (42%), privacy and security (35%) and data quality (34%).

Dentsu is expanding the scope of its Merkury data and identity platform.  A new media solution will combine clients’ own first-party data with identity, data, and media integrations across digital channels and identity graphs.  A new creativity solution will combine identity data with creative and media performance information to enable dynamic creative optimization.  Both will be rolled out in the first half of next year.

DrivenIQ positions itself as offering “enhanced capabilities to rival incumbent CDPs”  (hackles up, Mr. Sulu) although its main strength is identifying website visitors and enriching their profiles through 14 billion records linked to 660 million individuals. Their latest offering veers in a slightly different direction, linking its consumer identities with data about the businesses where those people work.  Hackles on standby.

Cloud data platform Databricks hasn’t been quite as eager to replace CDPs as Snowflake although it’s surely on their checklist for world domination.  They just agreed to spend something over $100 million for Arcion, which copies data from other systems into Databricks  The immediate threat is less to CDPs than point solutions such as data pipeline tools – a reminder that platforms like Databricks can effortlessly ruin the market for specialized components: think Godzilla flattening a house outside of Tokyo without even noticing.