CDP Institute

Site search and personalized recommendation vendor Sharpspring has added email to its supported channels through an integration with Klaviyo. Klaviyo is making friends faster than a butcher at a dog park: today they also announced an integration with buy now pay later service Sezzle, and two weeks ago they launched a strategic alliance with Shopify.

Remember when Teen Talk Barbie got in trouble for saying “math class is tough”? I doubt Media Buyer Barbie would have the same problem if she complained about programmatic advertising, which confuses everyone. The ANA is trying to help with a CMO’s Guide to Programmatic Transparency, 49 pages of wisdom that isn’t exactly beach reading, although a daiquiri might help.

IT teams spend lots of time on repetitive requests from business users, finds this TeamDynamix survey.  You might think the implication is IT should let users do more for themselves.  But the main time-wasters are things like password resets, employee on-boarding, and managing credentials, which can’t really be delegated.  And here’s the kicker: IT professionals automate those tasks by building sloppy, insecure, undocumented scripts, just like the non-professionals.   Fun fact: 53% of teams manage 100 or more applications.

Northbeam collects first-party data and uses it to help companies optimize ecommerce and direct-to-consumer ad campaigns while they’re running.  It’s a fairly crowded field but Silversmith Capital Partners thinks there’s enough more room left to justify giving Northbeam a $15 million Series A.

Gorgias develops customer service tools for ecommerce companies, and sells them for as little as $60 per month.  You won’t be surprised that they grew very quickly during the pandemic, reaching over 10,000 clients.  They just raised a $30 million Series C, bringing total funding to $72.4 million.

Let’s pay some attention to data engineering today, Dear Reader.  Observability vendor Monte Carlo Data finds that quality issues impact most or all business decisions at 47% of companies, and 26% of revenue is impacted by poor data quality.  The average data engineer spends two days a week dealing with data quality incidents – and 58% say the number of incidents has increased in the past year.

It’s hard to be strategic when you’re fighting fires every minute.  Half the respondents to this Digibee survey say they’ve rebuilt six or more key integrations in the past twelve months and 48% say poor integrations have impeded innovation.  But just 7% have a data integration strategy in place, even though 57% say it’s a top priority.

If you think data issues are challenging today, just wait.  Ocient finds that mere “big data” is being replaced by “hyperscale data”, which involves higher volumes and near-immediate analytics.  Nearly all respondents (97%) expect data volumes to rise quickly in the next few years and 59% expect to move to a new data warehousing platform to handle the growth.

Have you been debating whether marketing operations should be centralized or decentralized?  Neither have we, but it’s still interesting to learn that 59% of Marketo users told Perkuo their marops were centralized, 30% hybrid, and 5% decentralized.  More here on most- and least-used capabilities and most common weaknesses.  Is “marops” a thing?  “Markops” would be cooler, since it sounds like “marketing cops”.

There’s an entire genre of survey reports that compare how businesses and consumers see the same things.  This one from West Monroe finds a typical disconnect, concluding that consumers care more about simplicity and less about personalization, recommendations, and new products than companies think they do.  Privacy and security are the most common new digital investment (41%), edging out customer experience enhancement and customer data, both at 37%.

This Elastic survey takes a more positive view of website personalization, finding 88% of consumers say it makes them more likely to continue shopping.  They also note that 41% would share personal data for a more personalized experience, although a spoil-sport would point out that’s less than half.  Price still rules as the biggest reason people search on a website or switch brands.

I’ll take “Minor stories that illustrate industry trends” for $200, Alex.  The answer is “Neustar offers identity resolution within the Snowflake Marketplace”.  The question is, “Is Snowflake partnering with multiple identity management vendors?”