CDP Institute

Salesforce has also just announced an integration that lets its CDP read data from Snowflake, although they prefer the term “zero copy data sharing”.  The connection operates in real time, which isn’t always the case with these relationships.

The real work in building a CDP is assembling the customer profiles, whether they reside in a data warehouse or a separate CDP database.  This hasn’t prevented reverse ETL vendor HIghtouch from championing “composable CDP” to help sell its data extraction tool.  They’ve just added some features to make their extracts more useful to marketers, including abilities to split an audience into test segments and to profile audience members.

Salesforce is warming up for next week’s Dreamforce conference with a bundle of product announcements.  Today it focused on Customer 360, which makes unified customer profiles available for applications across the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Clouds.  That may sound like a CDP, but don’t be confused: the Salesforce CDP still exists as part of the Marketing Cloud.  On second thought, it’s okay to be confused.

Amazon has several new tools for companies that sell on its platform. These include a Buy with Prime page within brand storefronts on Amazon, customizable Sponsored Brand ads, co-branded ads on Facebook and Instagram, and free email promotions to repeat, recent, and high-spend customers. But it’s not all wine and roses in Seattle: California just filed an anti-trust suit over Amazon pricing policies.

Google also offers marketing tools to its friends. The latest goodies help publishers build audience and contextual segments, matching standards set by IAB Tech Lab’s Seller Defined Audiences. They’re also giving publishers more control over what data is shared with partners and how often the same person sees an ad on an app. But there’s rain on their parade too: new class action suits in the EU and UK alleging Google reduced publishers’ ad revenue, and a rejected appeal of a $4+ billion EU fine for forcing phone manufacturers to... Read More >

The folks at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are in a sour mood, judging by this report.  They find that actions from Apple, Firefox, and others have already removed half of the “signal fidelity” once provided by third-party identifiers, with even greater losses on the way.  Yet IAB sees state-level privacy regulation as an even greater threat.  Worse still, companies are doing a poor job in getting ready for the new situation.   Color them glum.

B2B marketers have their own complaints.  Intent data collector Anteriad reports that 61% feel their tech stack is too complex (if we include the 19% who compare their stack to a black hole).  The bright side is that companies with fully integrated data show better business results.  Also noteworthy: 33% have a CDP, comparable to marketing automation (35%), marketing databases (32%) and Data Management Platforms (31%), but still far behind CRM (61%).

The criticism keeps coming. Snap reports that companies are failing to take proper advantage of Augmented Reality (AR), by not recognizing that customers want to use it for practical applications such as shopping, learning, and entertainment.  Meanwhile, IntentHQ says failure to utilize existing data is costing telcos millions of dollars in potential revenue. Is cranky the new black?

Kroger was a pioneer of the retail media industry, which distributes ads through retailers’ own channels such as email and in-store displays.  They’ve just taken a logical next step, using Kroger customer data to target video and CTV ads in channels that Kroger doesn’t own.  Clients buy the ads in the Kroger Private Marketplace, a self-service platform for ad agencies and brands.

I was hoping that Spacee’s HoverTouch Wall was one where people did the hovering, like angels in a Renaissance fresco.  Alas, it’s the image itself that hovers in front of a surface, creating a touch screen without the screen.  That’s still pretty cool and greatly expands the potential inventory for retail media and out-of-home advertisers.

Marketers are much less satisfied with their IT relationships than their IT partners think: nearly 30% call the relationship strained or abysmal, compared to 10% of IT leaders.  This according to a Lytics survey which also found that 75% of marketers rely on IT for data access and 81% expect IT to be even more involved in day-t0-day marketing activities over the next five years.  Marketers would like more control if they could get it: 44% plan to hire a software engineer of their own in the next year and... Read More >

Is there anything so sweet as helping yourself while helping others?  Google just announced it will ban search ads that lead to annoyingly aggressive web sites, as defined by the industry-wide Coalition for Better Ads. The upside for Google is better customer experience should lead to higher ad rates.