CDP Institute

Twilio announced a 17% layoff yesterday, just five months after an 11% reduction. The company is reorganizing into two divisions, once focused on communications products and the other on data and applications, including the Segment CDP. Staff cuts will fall more heavily on the communications group.

Not every tech vendor is cutting back. Customer experience automation platform, which tripled its headcount in the past twelve months, will fuel continued expansion with a $50 million Series C. Ushur lets users create visual workflows for conversational interactions such as claims processing and appointment setting.

In the same way that beer is no longer just for breakfast, personalization is no longer just for marketing. This Forrester study for Adobe drives home the point by showing that people expect personalization at every step from product discovery through service and support. B2B buyers had even higher expectations than consumers.

The headline-grabbing conclusion of this INSEAD study is that ecommerce companies with tightly-integrated tech stacks grew more slowly under GDPR than companies with loosely coupled stacks.  The academic jargon is nearly impenetrable but the authors seem to argue that tightly integrated stacks are harder to change, and this resulted in worse customer experience when GDPR enforcement began.  It’s intriguing if not entirely convincing.

Companies that do more personalization create less content, according to this WordPress VIP report.  That’s easy to believe, since personalization lets companies repurpose the same content rather than creating new pieces for each customer group.  Lots more here about content budgets, strategy, analytics, and planning.

Content creation is a top pain point for many marketers.  This Chief Marketer study for OneTrust finds it’s also the top martech investment category, presumably because companies are trying to do it more efficiently.   Articles, videos, and reviews are the most effective content types, while influence marketing, images, and podcasts are the least effective.

When martech folk have nothing else to worry about, they fret about unused software licenses.  This study from Nexthink adds fuel to that fire with data from six million customers across nine industries in twelve regions.  Bottom line: just under half of all installed software and SaaS licenses went unused.  Ay caramba!

What many marketers fear most about the end of third-party cookies is lost audience reach.  Permutive, which assembles anonymized audiences from publishers’ first-party data, is addressing that (get it?) by adding its cohorts to the Xandr Marketplace.   Barking up a neighboring tree, Disney announced it will make is own connected TV audiences available through integrations with LiveRamp and Experian audience identifiers.

Sendinblue started as a small business email platform and has since expanded to more channels and bigger clients.  They just grew a bit further by purchasing Captain Wallet, which enables marketing through mobile wallets.  Both companies are French.

Search engines began some time ago to switch from listing relevant web links to providing answers within the search results. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard will hugely accelerate the transition. This opens new challenges opportunities for search engine optimization vendors. SEO platform Conductor just strengthened its ability to deal with whatever comes next by purchasing European-based competitor Searchmetrics.

Email is an even more venerable digital medium than web search, and ultimately even more vulnerable to change from AI. In addition to the obvious opportunities for machine-written email, there’s also the prospect of machine-empowered email fraud. South Africa-based Sendmarc just raised a $7 million Series A to help to ensure senders are who they claim.

Web3 is about as ill-defined as a concept can be, but you could still bet that someone would come up with marketing technology to exploit it. Sure enough, Sesame Labs just raised a $4.5 million seed round for a platform that will combine user profiles, segmentation, messaging, and rewards on Web3 platforms.