CDP Institute

There’s a fair amount of industry news today, but that can wait.  Let’s instead look at the latest episodes in The Regulators Strike Back. We’ll start with news that the California Department of Motor Vehicles has suspended driverless vehicle permits for GM’s self-driving car Cruise division.  This follows several accidents and many local protests.

Red and blue states don’t agree on much these days, but attacking Meta in the name of child safety is one scrap of common ground.  A total of 41 states plus the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits across federal, state, and local courts claiming that Instagram and Facebook harm the mental health of young people.  Many lawyers are going to busy for a long time.  

Google has plenty of its own legal problems. Already facing major anti-trust suits in the U.S. and Europe, it can now add Japan to the list. That company’s anti-trust regulator has opened an investigation in suspected violations of the country’s Antimonopoly Act, although they haven’t filed formal charges.

EngageSmart isn’t the most familiar name in martech circles but it’s a $350 million business selling customer engagement and billing solutions to more than 100,000 businesses.   The stock price has languished since the company went public just over two years ago, but investors are about to be rewarded with a $4 billion all-cash buyout from private investors at Visa Equity Partners and General Atlantic.

Nearly every B2B SaaS company (92%) offers some flavor of a free product offer, according to this survey from Paddle.  They also found that 94% update their pricing at least once per year, and the most popular packaging strategies are good/better/best (41%) and all-inclusive (31%).  Download for more interesting answers to questions you never thought to ask.

I was a bit disappointed when this Claravine report on “marketing data standards” turned out to focus narrowly on ad content and campaign data.  Still, it’s intriguing that advertisers estimate that 25% of ads serve consumers the wrong creative, and agencies peg that number at 30%.  CDPs rank fourth on the list of systems used for data standards, behind DSP, CRM, and DAM but ahead of CMS, data clouds, and marketing automation.

Good news is hard to find these days, so let’s squint at LXA’s latest State of Martech report and note significant progress since last year in the “people and team” dimension of martech maturity.  It’s still the lowest-ranked dimension but we’ll take it.  Other causes for cheer: 83% of CMOs expect to increase their martech budget in the next twelve months; 71% see martech as the heart of their marketing strategy; and 66% feel they can accurately measure the ROI of their martech investments.  You’re welcome.

Measurement is a topic of endless fascination because the old methods are fading and it’s not clear what will replace them.  DoubleVerify is an aggressive contender, building on its core business of checking whether web ads are actually seen (now trendily known as attention measurement).  Their latest project connects ad views with real-time purchase data from six-million-member panel tracked by Attain.

Battered and bruised they may be, but Nielsen is still arguably the marketing measurement champ.  They’ve just signed a deal to collect linear and connected TV Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) viewing data from LG Ad Solutions.  LG clients will receive streaming measurement reports from Nielsen ONE Ads, the long-promised cross-media measurement solution that Nielsen began rolling globally out last week.

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of marketing software buyers have regretted a software purchase in the past twelve to eighteen months, according to this Capterra survey. Clear goals and stakeholder alignment are seen as the best way to avoid problems. Regret or not, marketing software is the second highest priority investment across all categories (28%), second only to IT security (32%).

In another study of software buyers, G2 found marketing software ranked fourth (14%) in year-to-year growth in the number of products, behind AI (39%), design (17%), and human resources (14%).  The fastest-growing marketing categories were surprisingly prosaic: the top three were QR code generators, content creation, and press release distribution.  In total, G2 found 6,359 total marketing products, so 14% growth translates to net new 780 products.

It’s safe to say that a lack of software isn’t holding marketers back.  Dentsu reports that finding the right data is CMO’s biggest external challenge (38%), followed by understanding changes in consumer behaviors (35%).  Keeping up with emerging new tech (33%) and dealing with the fragmented tech landscape (30%) headed the list of media transformation challenges.