CDP Institute

This 64-page behemoth from MarketingOps covers nothing but. Fun fact: integration (80%) is by far the most common system selection criteria; next come price at 48% and scalability/growth potential at 47%.  Lots more on organization, responsibilities, tools, and professional backgrounds.  Oddly, they left out team cheers: I vote for MOPS, MOPS, We’re the Tops.

Enough frivolity.  Industry-specific (vertical) martech is a way for small vendors to grow in the shadow of big ones. Malou, a marketing system for restaurants, has just baked itself a $10 million funding round. (Apparently the real figure is €10 million but whoever wrote the press release thought Americans couldn’t handle it.  Did I mention Malou is French?) They serve over 2,000 restaurants across twelve countries.

Pew Research is among the most reliable sources of information about news consumption, but even they sometimes bury the lead (or “lede” if you collect Social Security).  Most chatter about this report on news sources was about the fact that Facebook is the most-used social channel for news, despite Meta’s attempts to downplay its role.  But I prefer to note that more U.S. adults often get their news from news websites and apps (29%) than search (27%), social media (19%), or, heaven forbid, podcasts (9%).

This Acquia study finds the top digital CX success factor is gathering enough preference data from consumers (35%), and the second-ranked is creating enough personalized content (24%).  Over-all, 98% say their return on martech tools has improved in 2023, but 66% in the U.S. still say their martech holds them back to at least some extent.  CDP ranks seventh of eighteen tools with the biggest positive impact on CX.

The programmatic ad system is widely reviled as a hot mess, but tolerated because it expands audiences and saves a lot of work.  So it’s not surprising that retail media, connected TV (CTV), and digital out of home are trying to replicate programmatic features. Supply side platform OpenX has announced a TV+, an on-going project to improve programmatic buying for CTV.  First step is to remove resellers and non-TV content such as mobile apps from its bidding pool.

In case you weren’t confused enough, CTV can also refer to Convergent TV.  That’s how it’s used by Comcast Advertising-owned AudienceXpress, which sells across all screens.  They just arranged for Epsilon clients to use their own first-party data and Epsilon’s third-party data for selection, targeting, and results measurement against AudienceXpress audiences.

Hightouch continues to expand beyond its core business of extracting data from a warehouse. Their latest move is to buy HeadsUp, which predicts customer conversions and loads the results in to a customer profile. They still can’t resist calling themselves a “Composable CDP”, which makes exactly as much sense the Goodyear Tire Company calling itself a “Composable Auto Maker”.

Well-funded martech firms like Hightouch are exactly the kind of company that this LUMA Partners report predicts will make more martech acquisitions in the near future.  Lots of other insights here, including the on-going strength of big tech companies, merger of adtech and martech, and distinction between composable strategies and best-of-breed.  An easy read and well worth the time.

Private equity services vendor Bluewave won’t let you see their market outlook report unless you agree to talk with a sales rep.  That would usually disqualify them from a mention here but they provide some useful information in their press release and, more important, are the latest industry observer to predict a pick-up in funding activities.  So let’s consider it another straw in what’s turning into a pretty consistent wind.

Few studies get into the statistically-valid details of first- vs third-party ad audience performance.  This joint Magna and Acxiom effort is an exception, randomly assigning members of each audience type to test and control groups and measuring the impact of pre-roll video ads on brand metrics.  The results were perhaps less impressive than the methodology: you probably could have guessed that first-party audiences contain more existing customers and third-party audiences, and both together yield higher results than either alone.

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each study of AI adoption is a bit different.  Cisco offers many familiar findings, including the limits imposed by poor data and a gap between marketers’ interest in AI and actual deployment.  More helpful may be a readiness from framework that calls out strategy, infrastructure, data, governance, talent, and culture as dimensions.

For a change of pace, let’s check in on the tech regulation wars.  While the courts generally side with social media companies due to protections of the CDA Section 320, a U.S. District Court judge ruled this week that a coalition of families, teens, school districts and state attorneys general could continue a lawsuit alleging harm to teens by major social media platforms.  It’s an interesting crack in the Section 320 armor.