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.
Next, we have an academic study with the obvious finding that Facebook’s interest category targeting is often wrong. Among other things, Facebook doesn’t differentiate positive from negative sentiment when inferring interest. Speaking of Facebook, there are reports that they paid a right-wing lobbying agency to plant negative stories about TikTok. Not exactly obvious, but not surprising, either.
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.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).