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.

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.