Meanwhile, $4 billion printing company Quad/Graphics continued its move towards integrated marketing services by purchasing creative agency Periscope for $132.5 million. Quad had already bought digital marketing agency Rise Interactive and marketing services company Ivie & Associates. Quad’s market cap is almost identical to Forrester’s, at $830 million, or just over 0.2x revenue.
By now you’ve seen plenty of reports about record-breaking online sales during the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday-to-Cyber-Monday period. But you might still be surprised that Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram drove 94% of all social traffic to retail sites. So says a report from Salesforce drawing from data captured in its systems. What, you thought Salesforce couldn’t see its client data? Don’t be silly.
Doubtful that technologists are really in charge of CX? Maybe you’re right: a CMO Council and IBM survey found that 61% said marketing owned customer experience strategy. Just 13% of respondents were CMOs while 61% were CEO, President, or COO. So less bias in that audience than you might expect. Only 20% said they had real-time access to all relevant customer data across the organization. Technology gaps were the most common obstacle to removing data silos (53%), although talent (48%) and time (45%) were close behind.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.