Chief Marketer paints a brighter picture: 21% of survey respondents said they plan a CDP investment in the next twelve months, similar to sales automation (25%) and mobile (18%) although well beyond email (54%) and marketing automation (51%). Just 13% felt they were “absolutely” optimizing their martech investments. Most common barriers were lack of time (58%) and skilled staff (56%).
Very Good Security stores sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, outside of a company’s own systems. Clients get a unique identifier that is linked to the data, so the data itself is never exposed to potential privacy breaches. It’s a good example of what can be done to protect privacy when businesses really try. The company just raised a $35 million Series B.
Video ads are obviously a hot category. In fact, the IAB reports they were the fastest growing of all digital media in the first half of 2019, up 36% over the first half of 2018, to $9.5 billion in the U.S. Total digital ad revenue rose just 17% to $57.9 billion. Growth was flat compared to the second half of 2018, the first time ever that there was no consecutive half increase.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.