CDP Institute

Movie theaters may be a new frontier for ecommerce, but shopping on social media is now almost standard.  Pinterest hasn’t been a leader but they did just add a Shopping API that lets merchants to upload their catalogs.  They also made it easier to tag products, upload videos, and put a shopping tab on business profiles.  Purchases are still completed outside of Pinterest in Shopify or other platforms.

Voice assistants are another new shopping channel.  Or maybe not so new: Vixen Labs reports that nearly half (48%) of U.S. consumers have made a purchase through a voice device, and even more use it for other tasks such as searching for information or tracking a shipment.  Fun fact: people in the U.S. are twice as likely to be comfortable using voice in public as people in Germany.

You may have noticed that social media trends appear faster than u cn rd ths.  It’s easy enough to find rising keywords, but mapping them to broader topics has traditionally required slow-paced human effort.  Social listening platform Synthesio is speeding that up with Topic Modeling, which uses AI to assign conversations to new categories as they emerge.

Verve Group, which has assembled a herd of mostly-mobile ad buying and selling tools, has added self-service mobile ad buying platform Dataseat to its flock.  Like other Verve properties, Dataseat specializes in placing ads without relying on customer or device identifiers that are rapidly vanishing due to privacy improvements.  Dataseat’s approach uses contextual signals to optimize campaigns.

A Nielsen study that finds marketers spend too little on advertising might seem too self-serving to mention.   But while the headline on this report is that 50% of campaigns spend too little to get optimal results, the unstated implication – that marketers should run fewer programs– is worth some thought.  Bigger eggs, fewer baskets.

The build-vs-buy debate never ends, and sometimes build really makes sense.  But buy is clearly the way to bet: just 17% of martech replacement projects chose a homegrown solution this year, according to this MarTech survey.  That’s down from 31% the year before.  CDPs were among the least common replacements, maybe because they’re awesome and maybe because most CDP implementations are fairly new.  Download for more fun facts.

The EU Parliament has adopted new rules targeted at reducing the dominance of BigTech platforms including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.  The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act apply to companies with a market cap over €75 billion and allow penalties up to 10% of global revenue.  The EU Council must still approve the acts before they take effect.

Speaking of BigTech Behaving Badly, we have this ProPublica report that Google was sending sensitive user data with a Russian adtech firm until just last month, when ProPublica asked them about it.  Mobile phone IDs, IP addresses, location information, and activity details from websites including ESPN and Reuters were part of bidstream information shared with RuTarget, which is owned by Russian bank Sberbank.  U.S. Treasury sanctions have banned transactions with Sberbank since February.

Netherlands-based retention management platform Retail Rocket just raised a $24 Million Series A, and immediately spent some of it to buy Sailplay, a New York-based marketing automation vendor that will grow its U.S. presence.  Retail Rocket builds unified customer profiles in a module it charmingly calls Data Warehouse, and has other modules for AI-driven personalization, segmentation, and campaign management.  The company has more than 1,000 global clients across Europe and South America.

Voyantis, which calls itself a “prediction-based growth platform” has launched with a machine learning product that uses customer value predictions to optimize advertising campaigns and tailor individual customer treatments.  What’s special is the predictions are updated more or less continuously, enabling quicker reaction to behaviors than usual.  The company also announced it has $19 million in seed funding.  

The data business is infinitely fascinating, amirite?  So you’ll be excited to learn that two firms which track consumer purchases are merging.  NielsenIQ specializes in measuring fast-moving consumer goods, while GfK collects data about consumer durables purchases.  Both are majority-owned by private investment firms, which will retain shares in the combined operation.

Will the metaverse rescue marketers from the loss of third-party cookies and device tracking?  Perhaps you scoff the metaverse doesn’t actually exist.  That didn’t prevent 74% of marketers telling Qualtrics they were already advertising in it and 59% of that group saying it’s their most successful channel.  Pioneering?  Optimistic? Delusional?  Take your pick.