CDP Institute

At just under six hours per day, traditional TV viewing is far from dead.   Still, this Comcast study reports 21% of advertisers are reducing their linear budgets – far more than social, streaming, or addressable TV.  The bigger news is that 73% of marketers are using addressable TV, 87% are using first party data, and last year saw a 51% increase in audience-based targeting.

Two-thirds of publishers (65%) don’t think first party data or alternative IDs will solve the problems of cookie deprecation, according to this Emodo report.  But just 40% rate it as a top priority and only 19% are prioritizing it when evaluating ad sales partners.  Top publisher priorities are the economy (57%) and attention metrics (52%), with less attention to supply path optimization (30%), tech costs (30%), sustainability (27%), and the growth of connected TV (26%).

No one likes to spend money on “made for advertising” (MFA) sites that have few actual visitors, although the outrage seems stronger among publishers than advertisers, who see the waste as a cost of doing business.  Still, for the advertisers who do care, NewsGuard has just launched a service to let advertisers build lists that exclude MFA sites from their campaigns or build lists of non-MFA sites to include.  

Growth in the CDP industry slowed to a crawl in the first half of 2023, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report.  Net employment, funding, new vendors and growth among previously listed vendors all fell to record or near-record lows.  Still, some firms are doing fine: 20% of the firms listed had an estimated employment increase of at least 10%.

We think that one reason industry growth has slowed is the near-total loss of early-stage venture funding.  But we could be wrong: this Capchase analysis of 900 SaaS businesses finds that self-financed companies grow just as quickly as venture-backed firms.  They also report that, whatever the gurus say, the best performing companies focus new customer acquisition not retention.  Interesting.

No one ever said that AI is easy, although they sometimes leave that impression.  This Altair survey sets the record straight: 55% of respondents report that at least one-third of their AI projects have failed to reach production in the past two years.  Lots of interesting reasons (messy data is high on the list), and even more interesting regional differences.  Perfect beach reading.

We haven’t written much about retail media recently, Dear Reader, and I’m sure you miss it.  So I’ll share that IPG Mediabrands has launched a “unique tech platform” that brings together retail media audience, measurement, optimization and intelligence to give brands a unified picture of how all their retail media investments are performing.  Are you quivering with delight or is the air conditioning too high?

You could certainly argue that we’ve written too much about generative AI, but there’s a lot going on.  Today we’ll note that Microsoft has launched Bing Chat Enterprise, which is a really silly sounding name if you think about it.  The big draw is making sure that company data isn’t shared with anyone else, which has quickly emerged as a major concern.

We can never write enough about how companies are using customer data. This Acxiom study covers the topic in depth. It has the added virtue of saying that almost everybody does it poorly, which should make you feel great, Dear Reader, since I know you’re the exception.

While U.S. anti-trust regulators keep losing ground, European regulators are growing more feisty.  The latest blow came from Spain, where the competition watchdog CNMC has fined Apple and Amazon a combined $218 million for limiting Apple resellers on Amazon Spain.  While the stated purpose was to reduce sale of counterfeit goods, the CNMC found the result was to restrict competition among authorized sellers and from competing non-Apple products.

This Digiday/Wiland survey is mostly about using external data to enhance customer files.  It turns out that 57% of companies do it, two-thirds use four or more sources, and 17% use ten or more sources.  But the news I found most interesting is that 30% of brands have built their own ID resolution system and another 22% plan to build one.  Apparently it’s okay to try this at home.

PLG fans rejoice: while product-led growth has received less attention recently than it had been, this Openview report offers lots of interesting data on the topic.  Most eye-opening was that PLG is actually a minor source of new customers: the report puts it at 5%, compared with 32% from organic search, another 32% from sales, and 17% from paid marketing.