CDP Institute

Are CDPs replacing DMPs?  Perhaps, but slowly: 36% of respondents to this Piano survey reported they use their CDP as a DMP, a figure that’s still far behind standalone DMPs (53%), audience management systems (50%) and DMP integrated with a supply side or demand side platform (43%).  Lots of juicy details here on data collection goals, growth in spending on data unification and on the revenue it creates, and data quality as the biggest collection challenge.

This study on data management is by Forrester for Zeta Global.  It also highlights data quality challenges: only half the respondents are confident in their data quality, security, reliability, and activation.  The thrust of the report is that companies have lots of systems impacting customer experience (84% have more than eleven), so poor integration among “best of breed” systems causes all kinds of problems.

Customer success platform Gainsight was among the firms we originally tagged as CDPs a decade ago. They don’t call themselves that anymore, although they probably still qualify.  Still, it’s rare to see even a borderline CDP make an acquisition, so let’s note that they just purchased learning management vendor Northpass.

Google and Meta may be willing to block news in Canada rather than pay the sites that create it, but blocking news in California would be a much bigger deal.  So you can bet their lobbyists were hard at work to slow down progress of the California Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which passed the state assembly in June.  Their efforts have succeeded: state senate action on the bill has been delayed until next year.

IAB Tech Lab has released a “stable” specification for its privacy audience activation standard and guidance for its data clean room standard.  Both are aimed at making it easier to share data between different data clean rooms, a key industry goal in making customer data available in a privacy-protected way.

Maybe marketers have finally started to grasp how little interest consumers have in personalized product recommendations.  This RIS News study of grocery tech trends found that while consumers ranked personalized recommendations dead last (seventh out of seven), retailers ranked it fifth out of seven.  Discounts headed the list for both groups.  But there’s still a misalignment: 13% of consumers wanted personalized recommendations, while 48% of retailers thought they did.

Italy-based Neodata Group and Adabra have merged to become Blendee. The firm will offer a combined “marketing operating system” that combines the Adabra Customer Data Platform with Neodata’s Adagio ad server and Exaudi Data Management Platform. The company also announced €6 million in new funding.

Customer experience has dropped from first to third place on the priority list of CEOs, according to this IBM survey. The new top priority is productivity or profitability, up from sixth place in 2022. Most of the survey focuses on generative AI, which 50% of CEOs say they’ve already deployed even though just 29% of their executive teams say they have the in-house expertise to do it.

Drilling down a level in the organization, Intercom finds that 67% of customer support leaders feel customers are ready to interact with an AI chatbot although just 45% of support teams agree. In fact, 53% of support teams are worried that AI will have a negative impact on the customer service industry, while 71% of leaders believe the impact will be positive.

Meta Threads isn’t the only product aiming to attract Twitter refugees.  Bluesky, a public benefit corporation that says it will make money without advertising and without locking down users’ data, announced an $8 million seed round on Wednesday.  It also revealed its first paid service, an option to buy custom domains to use as Bluesky handles.

While we’re on the topic of responsible marketing, this Dentsu report finds 61% of North American consumers say their purchases are influenced by a brand’s sustainability messages.  Boomers are more likely than other groups to believe national governments are most responsible fore sustainability, but millennials are most likely to say it factors into their votes.  Millennials are also the most hopeful about the sustainability’s impact on the future.

Boomers may be the only marketers who still remember when advertising was targeted by matching it against editorial content.  Nano Interactive is offering essentially that service, although they are describing it as a “library” of “intent personas” that work without cookies or any kind of personal data.  Sounds so much cooler that way.