CDP Institute

Consumers are split almost evenly in their attitudes towards personalized marketing.  Frontier Communications found that nearly half found targeted advertising annoying (46%) and invasive (36%) while a similar sized group find it useful (42%) and enjoyable (39%).  Along the same lines, 28% said they’d pay $50 per month or more for ad-free social media while 27% wouldn’t pay a penny.

We haven’t written much here about the growth of TikTok as an advertising channel, but it’s a big story.  One subplot has been more TikTok tools for advertisers.  The latest twist is integration with Foursquare Attribution, which will enable marketers to measure the impact of TikTok ads on retail foot traffic.

CDP mParticle is expanding its journey management capabilities with a new multi-step, multi-branch, cross-channel journey builder.  New features include journey analytics to uncover optimal journeys, testing within campaign flows, and continuous synching of audiences with delivery tools across advertising, email, messaging and other channels.

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.