CDP Institute

U.S. Internet ad revenue grew 10.8% last year, less than the pandemic-driven 35.4% of 2021 but far outpacing TV (up 2.0%) and print (down 6%.0), says this PwC/IAB report. Search fell from 42.2% of Internet ad revenue in 2020 to 40.2% in 2022 and social fell from 31.5% to 30.3%. Video more than took up the slack, growing from 18.7% to 22.5%. The report predicts retail media will grow quickly due to its privacy-safe first-party data and closed loop response measurement.

This Digiday survey for Best Buy.Ads offers a more cautious view of retail media prospects. Just 17% of respondents expected the importance of retail media networks to grow significantly in 2023, and the fraction of brands expecting to spend more than 60% of their budget fell from 14% to zero. Half (51%) said retail media were no more effective than other channels.

You’ll recall that earlier this week Google Analytics took away first-click attribution models, which not-coincidentally give less credit than other methods to search ads like Google’s.  Now we have this joint Microsoft-Roku effort that finds that coordinated TV streaming and web ads drive 11% more searches and 10% more clicks.  The methodology is complicated but the results are more realistic.

Cross-channel marketing platform Insider doesn’t call itself a CDP, although it does create unified customer profiles in a distinctly CDP-ish fashion. They’ve just crept even closer with a new Integration Hub which seems mostly focused on sending data from Insider to other systems. They’ve also tightened their two-way integrations with external CDPs including Segment, Tealium, and mParticle.

You can think of ID.me as a mirror image of companies that do identity resolution for marketing: instead of unmasking people who haven’t identified themselves, ID.me verifies that people are who they claim and gives them more control over how their data is shared. They just raised a $132 million Series D , bringing total funding to over $240 million.

The world of media measurement is filled with intrigue and plot twists, although I suspect only insiders follow it in detail. If you happen to be one of them, you may be excited to learn that the Media Rating Council has revoked its accreditation of Comscore’ Media Metrix desktop digital audience measurement service, one of the pillars of the industry. Then again, if you follow it in detail, you probably knew that already.

This Winterberry Group report finds mostly what you’d expect: marketing analytics leaders have better data, more organized data quality processes, and more analytical skills. One surprise is leaders are more likely to use a mix of marketing and non-marketing analytical teams. Another is that 63% of U.S. companies say their martech stack is fully integrated with the data it needs.

It’s not all unicorns and rainbows in marketing data land. Forrester reports that data lost to privacy and other constraints has created challenges across all marketing tasks for about half of the companies it surveyed. Zero-party data (surveys and such) is a promising solution, even though just 40% are using it effectively and about one-third have concerns about accuracy, privacy, and other issues.

There’s still some good news on the data capture front. For example, TVision second-by-second reports on TV and CTV engagement on a viewer-by-viewer basis. They recently partnered with TV ad platform Cadent to use the data to build audience segments and report on campaign results.

We weren’t kidding last week when we said the CDP Institute has more online courses on the way.  Today we’ve our third, offering in-depth training in selecting, building, and deploying CDP use cases.  Sponsor is SAP and this one is free too.

Some folks argue that the explosion of easily-integrated apps proves the suite vs best-of-breed debate is over and best-of-breed has won.  Staytuned has 34 million new friends, all named George Washington, who say otherwise.  That’s how much they’ve just added to their funding to buy a suite of apps (seven so far) to help Shopify merchants be more successful.

At what point am I permitted to run around the office flapping my arms and shouting “We’re doomed!” Maybe when I learn that ChatGPT isn’t merely presenting falsehoods, but making up fake news articles by real publications to back them up.  Doomed, I tell you!