CDP Institute

Some standards are developed by industry bodies and others are imposed by industry leaders.  Google Open Bidding lets third-party ad exchanges participate in real-time ad bidding.  It’s been criticized for siphoning revenue to Google and creating duplicate ad bids.  The Trade Desk dropped it in February and the Yahoo and Amobee demand side platforms dropped it last week.  Pick your own Star Wars analogy.

IAB Tech Lab will extend its Open Measurement SDK to Connected TV (CTV), starting in Q3.  The extension lets a single piece of code deliver viewability information to any verification service the advertiser chooses.  It also adds CTV-specific measures such as signaling if the TV is off when an ad is delivered, which seems like a useful thing to know.  

Let’s burst some balloons today, Dear Reader.  You know how everybody thinks no code and low code systems are taking over the world?  Software selection service GetApp finds no/low code is the least widely adapted (33%) of a half dozen emerging technologies – far behind voice interfaces (59%), Internet of Things (53%), and chatbots (49%).  Still worse, no/low code early adopters were twice as likely to report negative ROI as total marketers.  True believers may counter that no/low code systems are so common that many people don’t realize they’re using... Read More >

Artificial intelligence is often said to be more widespread than people recognize.  Accenture took a close look and concluded that 63% of companies are still just experimenting with AI, and only 12% are using it well enough to gain competitive advantage.  Lots of good advice and interesting detail here – well worth a look.  Or have a robot read it for you.

Product-led growth methods, such as freemium and free trial systems, are the latest silver bullet.  This OpenView report doesn’t exactly challenge the trend, but it does show it works better in some situations than others.  Did you know that activation rates are twice as high for single-user products than products requiring collaboration?

Salesforce has new AppExchange partners for its CDP, including Annalect, Acxiom, Criteo, LiveRamp, MediaMath, Metarouter, Neustar, Nine Digital, Streamlytics, The Trade Desk, Yahoo and WPP Resolve, along with a Google Ads integration. Other news from the company’s Connections event includes several new product names and new integrations among its marketing, commerce, customer service, and Slack products. If that’s not trendy enough for you, they’ve dipped their toe into Web3.0 with a closed pilot of NFT Cloud , which lets users create and manage non-fungible tokens.

Marketers are getting smarter about buying software, and one increasingly common practice is to test software before buying it.  TestBox promises to make that easier by offering preconfigured test installations of selected systems, complete with synthetic data.  They currently offer test versions of several customer support systems but plan to add new categories over time.  The service is free to users, with revenue coming from vendors who pay TestBox a commission on sales.  They just raised a $10 million seed round.

More on software buying: this CMO Council / KPMG study finds just 26% of marketing leaders actively partner with their company’s procurement departments.  Those who do work closely with procurement end up placing higher weight on price, vendors’ industry standing, security, and privacy practices, and less on ability to scale and to meet compliance rules.  It’s not clear this results in better outcomes.

Surfeit of surveys? Plethora of polls?  Rash of reports?  Any way you slice it, we’ve been publishing a lot of research recently, so I’m glad to feature business news today instead. We’ll start with a new data clean room from AppsFlyer, the first product in their previously-announced Privacy Cloud.

Next, we have a $25 million Series B for CreativeX, whose “creative data platform” analyzes brand images and video for quality, consistency, diversity, and regulatory compliance.  The actual metrics are objective items like aspect ratio, video length, and subtitles, so it’s more about meeting standards than fostering creative genius.  Which is fine: you need both.

Finally, Apple has extended Apple Pay with Apple Pay Later, its version of the increasingly popular installment billing option.  It’s a sound strategic move, encouraging both consumers and retailers to give more business to Apple.  But it’s worth doing for the product name alone.

Marketers are taking a gloomy view of the impact of privacy changes, according to this Modern Marketing Association (MMA) survey.  They expect cookie deprecation alone to reduce ROI by at least 22% and say Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) has already reduced ROI by 17%.  In response, well-prepared companies are accelerating their investment in first party data and 59% expect to invest in a CDP as part of the solution.