CDP Institute

One sign of a disciplined purchase process is to focus on features, not price.  But guess what Demand Gen Report found is by far the most common variable in evaluating B2B purchases, Dear Reader?  Yep, it’s price (82%), trailed by reviews (56%), features and functionality (54%), vendor knowledge of the buyer’s industry (53%), and deployment time/ease of use (50%).  Oh, and 55% say purchase times are getting longer and 59% of buying teams have four or more people.  I’m so sorry.

I apologize for that headline, Dear Reader, but do have one relevant factoid: Ebiquity reports that nearly 10% of U.S. programmatic ad spend goes to “made for advertising” web sites, which have high viewability but low quality, suitability, and effectiveness. In other words, clickbait. The global average is just under 8%. Also, 32% of third-party marketing cookies fire before users have a chance to consent and 93% of domains first at least one. So plenty of other people should apologize too.

Are you tired of bad news, Dear Reader?  Let’s look today at tech to make your business life better.  We’ll start with Contentware, which has expanded the types of campaign content it can auto-generate, based on nothing more than a brief description of the desired asset.  “What used to take 4-7 hours can now be done in 10 minutes” they tell us.  Whee!

Have you been struggling with Byzantine B2B procurement processes?  Balance Payments has your back, with tools for B2B sellers to collect funds through self-service checkout pages.  Features include multiple payment options, transaction fee support for marketplaces, and an API for further customization.  They just raised a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $86.5 million.

Or perhaps you’ve been placing ads in video games and worry about where, or whether, they’ve been showing up.  The media quality gurus Integral Ad Science have just teamed with in-game adtech vendor Anzu to measure important things like invalid traffic, viewability, and brand safety.   I’ll sleep better tonight just knowing about it.

Retailers are making progress in their personalization programs: they’re finally more likely to personalize product recommendations (52%) than show customer names (49%), finds Retail TouchPoints.  Other interesting trends are growing use of traditional media for acquisition, up from 29% in 2021 to 51% in 2022, and more purchase discounts for customer retention, from 55% last year to 73%.  Nearly two-thirds (63%) used a CDP to support their personalization program – more than any other technology.

Marketers have made less progress with measurement than personalization. Measured reports that more than 80% of direct-to-consumer marketers rely on click-based data from websites and media platforms, even though they know it’s unreliable. Near-infinitesimal fractions use gold standard methods such as incrementality experiments (4.7%) or multi-touch attribution (2.5%). Speaking of which, start-up Incrmntal just raised $4.1 million to make incremental measurement easier.

It’s not your imagination: good men (and women) are hard to find. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 77% of marketers said there’s a talent shortage in their organization.  In bad news for English majors everywhere, data and analytics skills top the list while creative and social media roles are at the bottom.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome.  They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment.  The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.

Audience measurement is a challenge across all channels, even when cookies aren’t involved.  Nielsen in particular has struggled to keep up with TV audiences, as delivery methods expanded beyond linear broadcasts to streaming networks, mobile devices, and on-line video.  Their latest extension is “Four-Screen Ad Deduplication”, which adds deduplicated YouTube viewers to its Total Ad Ratings data.

Out-of-home advertising includes not just billboards but video displays in retail stores and other public locations.  Geopath specializes in measuring those channels.  They’ve just done a deal with in-store audio ad network Stingray to expand their coverage of out- of-home audio ads, addressing a problem you may never have even considered.

Our recent Industry Update found a slowdown in CDP vendor funding, but Cordial is bucking the trend.  They just announced a $50 million Series C, bringing total funding to $73.6 million.  We classify Cordial as a Delivery CDP, since their system sends messages.  Channels include email, SMS, mobile apps, and websites.