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.
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).