CDP Institute

Email marketing platform Litmus didn’t start out in content recommendation, but they bought in with their acquisition of Kickdynamic last November.  They just integrated the Kickdynamic technology into their core email tools. What caught my attention is the recommendations are based on a CDP-ish collection of data from company systems including “CRM, product feeds and more.”

Do you often say to yourself, Gosh, it’s hard to buy things online? Me neither. But the folks at shopping site PureWow are on the case anyway, saving you from the drudgery of shopping carts and Buy Now buttons with “wowtext”, which lets you respond to an offer by texting back one number, showing how many you’d like to buy. I feel less tired just thinking about it.

Treasure Data continues its steady product expansion with the release of a new omni-channel journey orchestration tool called, well, Journey Orchestration.  Key selling points include a no-code journey builder, options to base journeys on lifecycle stages or specific events, and journey dashboards to track it all.  Also, there’s a soothing pastel color scheme.

Acxiom already sells tons of data, but if you want even more, they’ve just launched the Acxiom Partner Marketplace which makes it easier to buy from vendors including Commerce Signals, Equifax, NCSolutions (NCS), Polk Automotive Solutions by IHS Markit, and Veeva Crossix.  Everything is linked to Acxiom’s own “people-based identity spine”, which I’m thinking would make a great Halloween costume.

CloudShare, which lets sales reps run remote demonstrations and training exercises, can now push data from CloudShare projects directly into Salesforce.  That may seem like small beer, but anything that makes it easier to share data is a win.

Just under half (49%) of the B2B marketers responding to this Terminus survey report having a CDP, placing CDP ahead of marketing automation (45%) and not far from CRM (59%).  The figure seems crazy high, so we’ll chalk it up to confusion about what a CDP is.   In fact, 87% say their revenue team still needs more data, so if they do have a CDP, they’re not using it well.

This Groove survey of sales leaders also finds that CRM tops their investment priorities at 52%. It doesn’t mention CDP but does put new data sources second at 44%. The main headline is that 46% of revenue teams don’t plan a full return to the office, ever. Raining on that parade: Outfunnel found that companies with a fully remote work structure have the worst sales-marketing alignment and are least confident of reaching their revenue goals.

For more B2B excitement, here’s news that UK-based Rhetorik Ltd has purchased U.S.-based Datarista.  Both firms offer B2B data, hygiene and integration.  In fact, Rhetorik has something called a Global Data Platform, which sounds awfully impressive.

The good news in this Hypeauditor report on influencer marketing is that Instagram fraud rates dropped more than 20% since 2019. The bad news is fraud still impacts 49% of influencers. Perhaps worse still: according to Winterberry Group, 2022 U.S. influencer ad revenue of $7.0 billion is actually higher than ad revenues for U.S. newspapers ($6.3 billion) or magazines ($6.2 billion).

This YouGov report doesn’t break out influencer media, but it does put social networks (36%) second behind only TV (50%) as a news source, roughly tied with newspaper websites (35%). Printed newspapers are far down the list (18%) although still just barely ahead of podcasts (16%). But podcast use is growing while the others are all coming down. (Pew Research shows higher podcast use but slower growth.)

Circling back to marketing issues, this Merkle survey finds that consumers express the usual conflict between liking personalized offers (86%) and suspecting that big tech data policies mostly benefit the tech companies themselves.  Still, just 13% say they always reject cookies and 90% would provide more information in exchange for a positive brand experience.

Automated copy generation vendor Persado has launched new tools to tailor content to personal preferences, at the segment or individual level.  They call their customer-level “Language Profiles” a “new form of first party data” but it’s not clear whether they’re asking customers about the copy they receive or simply observing what they respond to.  If they were really good at this, they’d have known to show me the answer.