It’s not your imagination: good men (and women) are hard to find. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 77% of marketers said there’s a talent shortage in their organization. In bad news for English majors everywhere, data and analytics skills top the list while creative and social media roles are at the bottom.
Marketers have made less progress with measurement than personalization. Measured reports that more than 80% of direct-to-consumer marketers rely on click-based data from websites and media platforms, even though they know it’s unreliable. Near-infinitesimal fractions use gold standard methods such as incrementality experiments (4.7%) or multi-touch attribution (2.5%). Speaking of which, start-up Incrmntal just raised $4.1 million to make incremental measurement easier.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome. They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment. The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.
CDP CleverTap has raised a $105 million Series D, bringing more than doubling total funding to $182 million. You may recall that CleverTap bought personalization vendor Leanplum in late May of this year. It’s another sign that martech funding hasn’t totally dried up.