Some people might confuse Acxiom with a CDP, although they are quite clear their business is selling customer information. They just announced an integration with CDP Treasure Data, which will use Acxiom’s identity capabilities to help customers build their own identity graphs. Acxiom has deals with other CDPs, although this integration might be deeper than most.
Rudderstack is usually careful to call itself a data pipeline tool that will “turn your warehouse into a customer data platform”, although their latest press release says they’re “the warehouse-first, customer data platform built for developers”. We say they’re definitely a pipeline because CDPs are by definition packaged software, not developer tools, and because they don’t control the cloud data warehouse itself. Whatever you call them, they a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $82 million.
If there’s a third bit of CDP news today, I missed it. So I’ll give you this Emplifi survey reminding you the customer experience is really important. It’s a familiar song but bears repeating: more than half of consumers would pay more than 5% extra for outstanding CX, and poor CX effectively ties with poor product as a reason to leave a brand. I shouldn’t be surprised that more people want to communicate with brands through social media (22%) than email (19%) or telephone (16%), but I was.
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.