CDP Institute

Why do Customer Relationship Management when you can use “the industry’s first Strategic Relationship Management (SRM) platform” from Databook? Puffery aside, Databook’s system does seem to offer something genuinely new: it gathers public information about companies and uses it to identify likely financial pain points, strategic priorities, relevant products and use cases, and executive sponsors for buying a seller’s products. Lots of AI here, of course.

This Demand Gen Report survey also puts data at the head of B2B marketers’ priority list. In particular, marketers are looking for intent data to help guide their efforts. But just 18% report having an intent data strategy fully executed and being measured.

Sales enablement vendor Seismic also has data on its mind. Their survey of sales professionals found that enablement tech can save an average of 13 hours per week, mostly by reducing the time spent trying to find relevant information. Half the respondents (51%) are considering leaving their current job because the company doesn’t give them the tools they need for success.

ActionIQ has released a new Profile API that enables real-time access to external data, allowing the CDP to use data stored elsewhere without first importing it.  This sort of hybrid approach – storing some data in the CDP and reading other data from external systems as needed – is still rare but we’re seeing more of it.

Customer experience platform Qualitrics is running its annual conference right now, which is the occasion of much merriment and many announcements.  Two relevant to you, Dear Reader, are a new integration with Merkle’s Merkury identity resolution service and another to exchange data with Twilio Segment. So much fun!

This State of Martech 2023 report from CleverTouch found that just under 60% of B2B and B2C companies have a CDP in place, as do 77% of B2B2C firms.  U.S. firms rare twice as likely as European firms to consider themselves data-driven (54% vs 23%) and almost twice as likely to restrict martech system users to martech specialists (47% vs 28%).  Cross-channel “hyper-personalization” has grown from 9% of respondents in 2022 to 26% in 2023.

Retail advertising company Criteo has purchased Brandcrush, an Australia-based firm that specializes in helping retailers sell ads in their own online and offline locations.  The deal gives Critero a firmer foothold in the booming retail media network industry, as well expanding their presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Mobile ad platform InMobi has launched an IOS programmatic ad bidder that avoids user-level identifiers.  The product leverages privacy-safe data signals and Apple’s SKAdNetwork (SKAN) 4.0 attribution framework.  With ever-increasing constraints on user-level data, this is the way of the future.

Who knew that media measurement could be so exciting? In the latest plot twist, ad sales platform Sharethrough has burst into the scene with ad inventory packages based on Adelaide’s attention measures rather than impressions.  Meanwhile, in what’s widely seen as a criticism of measurement standards proposed by the TV-programmer-dominated Joint Industry Committee, YouTube has offered its own set of cross-media audience measurement principles.

Salesforce yesterday announced its generative AI application for CRM, named Einstein GPT. It’s far from the “world’s first”, as claimed in their press release, but does connect with Salesforce data, integrate with ChatGPT-parent OpenAI, and do all the cool generative AI content creation. Or, it will eventually: right now it’s in a closed pilot.

There is a special corner of the marketing automation world for “multi-location” businesses, in which a central brand coordinates with (often fiercely) independent local dealers or franchise holders. SOCi lives in that corner with clients including Ford, Ace Hardware, and Stanley Steemer. They just raised $120 million in financing, which they’ll use to integrate with – you guessed it – OpenAI to help local partners make better, faster marketing decisions.

I don’t know when Zeta started calling itself “the AI-Powered Marketing Cloud”, but that no longer sounds very special. They’ve just announced a variety of AI-based enhancements, including omnichannel forecasting, enhanced propensity scoring, and no-code data warehouse connections. It’s the warehouse connections that catch my eye: AI has great potential to remove that bottleneck, yet few vendor talk about applying it to the problem.