This Experian report also has some interesting insights about attitudes towards data. The main finding is that 84% of respondents say their company’s data is mostly managed by IT but 75% think departments should be responsible. These are not happy campers. Oddly enough, half say they have a single customer view in place, with most saying it sits in a CRM or marketing automation system. No mention of CDPs.
You always seem interested in Salesforce news, Dear Reader. We’ll test that by reporting that the company will partner cloud services giant Alibaba to sell its systems in China. This will presumably require acquiescing to Chinese data privacy and surveillance rules. Perhaps a bit of a moral quandary but this is the same Salesforce that ignored objections to working with the current U.S. regime’s immigration agency.
We also have an interesting collaboration between Catalina Marketing and LiveRamp. Marketers will be able to use Catalina audience segments through the LiveRamp Data Store, making it easier to optimize ad campaigns against 85 million households. It’s another escape route from the walled gardens.
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).