CDP Institute

How big a problem is zombie martech? Half (51%) of the respondents to this Demand Metric survey for Integrate said they have a great or very great amount of redundant or unused tech. But they don’t seem too worried about it: 64% said their current martech stack supports them well or very well, 44% plan to increase their marketing ops and martech spending, and more plan to add new systems (32%) than to make their stack smaller (26%). Interesting.

One hidden cost of unused martech is the effort that went into installing and integrating it. This Digibee study of large enterprises found that 16% to 25% of IT spend goes to integration, and half the companies rebuild six or more integrations each year. Worse still, 79% of those new integrations cause significant downtime, which can easily cost more than $1 million per hour.

Tech budgets increase pretty much no matter what, but spend on creative is more volatile. Lions Advisory found that 53% of brands expect to reduce creative investment this year, while just 17% expect an increase. They’re blaming the prospect of recession, not AI, in case you’re wondering.

Apple’s initial courtroom victory over Epic Games’ challenge to its app store payment policies was largely reaffirmed in an Appeals Court ruling, The court apparently concluded that requiring apps to pay Apple a hefty commission isn’t monopolistic because people can always switch to Android if they object. People chose phones largely for their app store payment rules, right?

Anti-trust rules are tougher outside the U.S. Google Play Store has been required by both EU and UK regulators to allow alternative payment options for in-app purchases. Google resisted, of course, but they ultimately have to comply. They just released a proposal for doing that in the UK. App owners will be incented to favor the Google payment system but aren’t required to use it.

Outbrain is a native advertising platform, which means it posts those click-baity stories crowding the margins of many web sites. They’ve just partnered with Assertive Yield, which analyzes the revenue those stories generate. The deal will let Outbrain’s clients optimize their content selections based on real-time performance. It’s one more example of combining data from two sources to tie ads to results.

Nobody ever had too much fun, say the country song writers.    But apparently they can have too much data.  This Oracle study finds 91% of business leaders say their success has been limited by the growing number of data sources, and 73% say lack of trust in data has prevented them from making any decisions at all.

Having data isn’t all bad, of course.  Demand Metric and AlignBI report that 68% of star performers have a complete or near-complete view of their customers, compared with just 18% of under performers.  Trust is an even bigger differentiator: 71% of star performance trust their data compared with just 15% of under performers.  Much more here on metrics, technology, staffing, and other details.

Here’s still more on customer data: CMO Council finds that it’s co-owned by sales and marketing at 36% of companies, while it’s in separate silos at 25%, owned by a separate function in 18%, owned primarily by marketing at 13% and by sales at 8%.  Just 39% are investing in a data warehouse or CDP, although fragmented technology is the biggest obstacle to better sales-marketing alignment.

Data clean room vendor Habu has added a native integration with Google Cloud BigQuery, making it easier for companies share data without revealing sensitive information.  Habu and BigQuery already have lots of other integrations, so this isn’t all that exciting.  But it does illustrate the continued growth of clean rooms and of customer data-related options in BigQuery.

One mark of a maturing tech category is that industry-specialist vendors emerge.  Right on cue, we have news from Optable, a data clean room specializing in advertising applications.  They just raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

Disney Advertising announced its own data clean room last October and added new features last month.  You can reasonably assume it’s powering their new deal with Kroger’s retail media network, which will let advertisers use Kroger data to target Disney streaming TV audiences on Hulu and to measure advertising results.