CDP Institute

Connected TV (CTV) ads increased 57% to $15.2 billion in 2021, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  CTV revenue has plenty of room to grow: IAB notes CTV accounts for 36% of total TV time but just 18% of video ad dollars.  A separate Innovid study also shows headroom: they find the average CTV campaign reaches under 10% of the possible audience with relatively low frequency.

Podcast advertising is growing even faster than CTV, says a different IAB report.  Podcast revenue blew past the $1 billion mark in 2021, reaching $1.4 billion on a 72% increase.  IAB says it will exceed $4 billion by 2024.

Empathy is apparently in fashion.  Exhibit 1: Qualtrics positions its latest integration with SAP Service Cloud as adding ‘empathy’ to the contact center.   They’re talking about Qualtrics’ ability to tag conversations, call notes, social media posts, and reviews with sentiment, intent, effort, and other attributes.  SAP owned Qualtrics from 2018 to 2021.

Exhibit 2: this Alida survey of CX professionals found that 91% believe empathy is important for creating CX improvements and 72% say it’s important for creating business value.  But just 30% said their organizations actually use empathy to build value and 36% think their organization agrees that it’s important.  Do you feel their pain?

Consumers agree there’s an empathy deficit: Salesforce reports that 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs but 56% say they’re treated as a number. Other tidbits: 88% say experience is as important as product or services; consumers are more comfortable sharing their data now than two years ago; and while 85% expect a consistent customer experience across departments, 60% say companies fail to deliver it. Download for more.

Hamlet read words, words, words, but we have trends, trends, trends.  Attribution is one popular topic, and brand performance agency Media Culture has offered its contribution by launching Abacus Multichannel Measurement Suite.  The method to their madness is finding the long-term, incremental impact of cross-channel impressions.

Marketers will be targeting their messages long after third party cookies have shuffled off this mortal coil.  Vibrant Media will be there to help with solutions that are based on classifying page content but go beyond the usual contextual targeting to build audiences based on keywords people have searched for, and then target ads to the audience members wherever they appear.

“To thine own shelf be true” would be a great motto for a retail consultancy, although UK-based GIG Retail hasn’t chosen it.  But they are entering the U.S. with a package of services to help retailers build their own media networks, an increasingly popular project.  So far, no one has protested too much.

Shopify is buying fulfillment services provider Deliverr, which lets merchants offer their customers standard, three-day, and two-day delivery services.  Price is a hefty $2.1 billion.  It’s another example of Shopify bolstering its clients’ ability to compete with Amazon.

Buying consumer data has always been hard, and the liabilities associated with privacy violations add new risks.  Neutronian is in the business of fixing that, with ratings, certifications, and frameworks to evaluate the sourcing and transparency of marketing data sources.  They just released their first full ratings report ranking 250 companies that sell audience data.

The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) is an industry trade group, so they’re not exactly in business at all.  But they’re also giving marketers a clearer picture of the data they’re being offered.  The DAA just announced program to certify that consumer identifiers have been gathered in compliance with privacy rules and to document permitted uses.

Yesterday was both Cinco de Mayo and World Password Day, which probably means a lot of passwords are now set to Taco. Microsoft, Apple, and Google marked the day ironically, by announcing joint plans to support the password-free sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium. Security experts have come to regard passwords as inherently insecure, preferring hardware- or biometric-based alternatives.