CDP Institute

Hungry for loyalty research?  Well, pull up a chair, my friend, and tuck into this deep-thinking study from SAP Emarsys.  They define five kinds of loyalty and report how they’ve changed over time.  Then they dig into loyalty drivers, attitudes, behaviors, and expectations across the US, UK, Australia, and Germany.  You’ll probably be happy to know that 24% of respondents are more loyal to brands that offer more personalized marketing if it’s tailored to their needs.

Streaming TV is may be a good place to sell mobile apps, but it can be hard for buyers to complete a transaction.  Roku has partnered with game building engine Unity to let users buy an app with their remote, without leaving whatever show they’re watching.  Marketers gain easy campaign set up, management, and measurement using Unity’s Luna marketing tool.

Few topics in digital media gain as much attention as, um, attention.  Whether it’s a potential ad buying currency or a tool for optimizing results, people love to talk about it.  Integral Ad Science (IAS) has taken a more systematic approach with this survey of media experts.  Key findings: over 80% of companies report improved results after implementing an attention strategy; the most important components of an attention measure are visibility, situation, and interaction; and social media is the most measurable channel.

This 64-page behemoth from MarketingOps covers nothing but. Fun fact: integration (80%) is by far the most common system selection criteria; next come price at 48% and scalability/growth potential at 47%.  Lots more on organization, responsibilities, tools, and professional backgrounds.  Oddly, they left out team cheers: I vote for MOPS, MOPS, We’re the Tops.

Enough frivolity.  Industry-specific (vertical) martech is a way for small vendors to grow in the shadow of big ones. Malou, a marketing system for restaurants, has just baked itself a $10 million funding round. (Apparently the real figure is €10 million but whoever wrote the press release thought Americans couldn’t handle it.  Did I mention Malou is French?) They serve over 2,000 restaurants across twelve countries.

Pew Research is among the most reliable sources of information about news consumption, but even they sometimes bury the lead (or “lede” if you collect Social Security).  Most chatter about this report on news sources was about the fact that Facebook is the most-used social channel for news, despite Meta’s attempts to downplay its role.  But I prefer to note that more U.S. adults often get their news from news websites and apps (29%) than search (27%), social media (19%), or, heaven forbid, podcasts (9%).

This Acquia study finds the top digital CX success factor is gathering enough preference data from consumers (35%), and the second-ranked is creating enough personalized content (24%).  Over-all, 98% say their return on martech tools has improved in 2023, but 66% in the U.S. still say their martech holds them back to at least some extent.  CDP ranks seventh of eighteen tools with the biggest positive impact on CX.

The programmatic ad system is widely reviled as a hot mess, but tolerated because it expands audiences and saves a lot of work.  So it’s not surprising that retail media, connected TV (CTV), and digital out of home are trying to replicate programmatic features. Supply side platform OpenX has announced a TV+, an on-going project to improve programmatic buying for CTV.  First step is to remove resellers and non-TV content such as mobile apps from its bidding pool.

In case you weren’t confused enough, CTV can also refer to Convergent TV.  That’s how it’s used by Comcast Advertising-owned AudienceXpress, which sells across all screens.  They just arranged for Epsilon clients to use their own first-party data and Epsilon’s third-party data for selection, targeting, and results measurement against AudienceXpress audiences.

Hightouch continues to expand beyond its core business of extracting data from a warehouse. Their latest move is to buy HeadsUp, which predicts customer conversions and loads the results in to a customer profile. They still can’t resist calling themselves a “Composable CDP”, which makes exactly as much sense the Goodyear Tire Company calling itself a “Composable Auto Maker”.

Well-funded martech firms like Hightouch are exactly the kind of company that this LUMA Partners report predicts will make more martech acquisitions in the near future.  Lots of other insights here, including the on-going strength of big tech companies, merger of adtech and martech, and distinction between composable strategies and best-of-breed.  An easy read and well worth the time.

Private equity services vendor Bluewave won’t let you see their market outlook report unless you agree to talk with a sales rep.  That would usually disqualify them from a mention here but they provide some useful information in their press release and, more important, are the latest industry observer to predict a pick-up in funding activities.  So let’s consider it another straw in what’s turning into a pretty consistent wind.