CDP Institute

Here’s a familiar tale: Clevertouch reports that 44% of marketers have at least one platform that goes largely unused but 90% will still make technology their biggest investment in the next year.  The company says “increasing numbers of organizations are deploying ‘simplification solutions’” to shield marketers from complex technology, but doesn’t say how many.

Another story we keep telling is that customers really aren’t that interested in personalization.  This survey for Sitecore by The Lacek Group finds that product quality (65%), money-saving offers (60%), and loyalty rewards (55%) are the biggest drivers of customer loyalty, while unique personal experiences (31%) and personalized communications (27%) are least important.  Customer service (52%), privacy protection (45%), and brand values (36%) fall somewhere in between.

It’s all surveys today, Dear Reader.  First, this Nielsen study finds that marketers rate audience targeting and creative as more important for campaign success than personalization or journey-based messaging.   Most believe that effective targeting requires behaviors as well as contextual data.  Lots more here on channel growth and effectiveness, ROI measurement, marketing objectives, and related topics.

Targeting data is threatened by new privacy constraints, so 99% of marketers are working to replace it, says this Forrester study for data verification vendor SheerID. Most (85%) see “zero party” data (data that customers share voluntarily, such as survey responses) as critical for effective personalized experiences, but 36% worry that customer answers are not always accurate.  Adding to the challenge: 42% of marketers have access to zero-party data but don’t know how to use it effectively.

Nearly one-third (31%) of marketers plan to replace their current marketing automation system in the coming year, according to this Ascend2 study.  Another 43% are unsure about their plans.  Unfortunately, buyers prioritize price (58%) and ease of use (54%) over integration (22%), feature breadth (21%) and feature depth (19%), so their next system isn’t guaranteed to meet their needs, either.  Perhaps related: just 22% rate their marketing automation program as very successful.

Nearly half (49%) of marketers sell ads in their emails, according to this Digiday survey from messaging platform Jeeng.  Behavior-based email personalization is now used by 67% of marketers, up from 60% in 2021.  That makes it more common than name-based personalization, which fell from 78% to 66% usage.

You may not be used to ads in your emails, but ads on social networks now seem entirely normal. So it makes sense that OpenWeb, which helps publishers build private social communities, just to bought ADYOULIKE, which lets publishers sell ads on those networks. Price was reported at $100 million.

Observe.AI, which offers AI-powered insights into contact center interactions, has raised a $125 million Series C, bringing total funding to $214 million.  Observe.AI uses speech analysis to understand conversations, recommend responses to call center agents, and execute intelligent workflows.

This was going to be a story about Omnicom Media Group’s new programmatic private marketplace for out-of-home display screens, which illustrates trends including programmatic,  out-of-home ads, and private marketplaces. But OMG trumped itself with an alliance with Firework to embed shoppable livestream video in brand web sites. That checks the trend boxes for social commerce, video ads, agencies offering adtech, and bypassing conventional ad channels.

Neighborhood social media network Nextdoor offers its own alternative to the usual ad channels.  They just added a self-serve ad campaign management tool to make it even easier for small and mid-size businesses to advertise without relying on agencies or other specialists.  Self-service and bringing agency functions in-house are two more trends we track.

Email data and marketing tools vendor Validity has purchased MailCharts, which reports on marketing activity by competitors.  The trends here include vendors expanding their product scope and acquisitions.  Price wasn’t reported, so we don’t know whether the deal also illustrates buyers paying crazy-high prices or a dampening of the market.  But it’s a trend either way.

Google Cloud Analytics Hub is adding access to Neustar consumer data and identity resolution services. Analytics Hub is a managed service that runs on Google’s BigQuery cloud database. It overlaps with CDPs by helping companies to manage and share customer data in privacy-safe ways. Neustar also announced a separate partnership to integrate its analytics tools with consumer data from Catalina.