CDP Institute

Back when meal kit subscriptions were having their moment, Blue Apron was among the leaders.  But that moment has passed and Blue Apron was just sold to food and restaurant company Wonder Group for $103 million.  It’s a long drop from their $1.7 billion peak value in 2017.

Cookieless marketing platform (and CDP) Commanders Act has purchased Adloop, which offers a no-code marketing analytics platform.  The deal will add campaign-level performance analytics and media optimization to Commanders Act’s core offering.  It’s a good reminder that CDPs are taking a larger role in advertising management.

ActionIQ also has a new friend: it has partnered with Teradata for a joint offering that will connect ActionIQ’s segmentation, real-time profile access, identity resolution marketing and journey orchestration features with Teradata VantageCloud’s data management and analytics capabilities.  Why, yes, the deal takes advantage of ActionIQ’s composable architecture.

That companies who expand marketing budgets during a business downturn ultimately do better than their competitors is one of those bits of information that are often cited but rarely traced back to an actual study.  So it’s nice to see it confirmed by this analysis of Federal Deposit Insurance data by The Financial Brand.  The study properly offers many caveats about its findings, but it does show marketing spend correlates with higher revenue growth.

Let’s look past the trees to some forests today, Dear Reader.  Here’s news that digital experience analytics vendor Contentsquare is buying product analytics platform Heap.  Closer integration of product marketing and consumer marketing has been a trend for some time.

Another long-term development is the slow collapse of social media advertising as users and ad buyers find more compelling alternatives.  This Skai report brings it into focus: paid social ad cost per thousand were down 29% year- on-year, although impressions and clicks rose 35% so net ad spend was down just 4%.  By contrast, paid search cost per click was largely flat (down 4% year-on-year) while retail media impressions, clicks, and spend were all up (32%, 36%, and 35%, respectively).

This Kantar report confirms what you probably knew already: online video and video streaming are the fastest growing competitors for social media ads.  This, in turn, is seeding growth of new solutions like this Dentsu, GumGum Verity and Iris.tv joint effort to enable keyword-based contextual targeting and brand safety controls to Connected TV ads. (This item also illustrates a trend of companies to reveal news without a formal press release or blog post; that’s a bad direction in a world where the truth of unsourced news items is always in... Read More >