This Ascend2 survey for Oracle has lots of interesting information, but also some puzzles. For example: CDPs rank first on the list of planned martech investments (37%) but data silos data and poor integration fall last on the list of challenges. Or consider this: 82% say they want to change some stack components to improve performance while 88% say they already have access to appropriate data for marketing decisions.
Finally, Thales Group offers a study with the delightfully obvious conclusions that companies do a poor job of protecting sensitive data and that remote work makes things even worse. The problem is certainly obvious to corporate leaders: 28% said they wouldn’t trust their own personal data to their organization. Hey, they may be inept but they’re not stupid.
Data connectivity vendor Kong surveyed tech staff, not marketers. That group ranked poor integration, in the form of multiple technologies, as the top obstacle to innovation. In fact, even though 75% fear competitive failure if they don’t innovate, the group rated security, performance, and reliability as more important than innovating quickly. On the other hand, they’re all-in on microservices, with more than half running at least 50 and 86% seeing them as “the future”.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.