CDP Institute

In classic lemonade-from-lemons style, Google is adapting to the loss of cookies by switching Google Ads’ default conversion reporting away from click-based methods to machine learning-based attribution models.  The company swears its technique drives lower cost-per-acquisition, and it probably does.  But it also requires you to trust that they’ll honestly report results since there’s no way to check their work.

Data observability platform Bigeye has raised a $45 million Series B, bringing its total to $66 million.  I know you probably don’t care, Dear Reader, but am reporting it anyway because it’s important to recognize the booming growth of data management tools that help IT departments construct their own customer data management systems.

This Harris Poll study for Redpoint Global offers a sobering view of customer experience reality.  They found that marketers are twice as likely as consumers to think brands deliver an excellent experience (51% vs 26%), while under half of the marketers who use advanced technologies including personalization, AI-driven recommendations, or multi-variate testing think they are having great success with them.  Fun fact: the average number of customer engagement systems is now 16, nearly double the figure in 2019.

Here’s another fun fact: the average company has 254 SaaS applications, according to this survey from SaaS management vendor Productiv.  Less fun: just 45% of those apps are used on a regular basis, although the rate is a slightly higher 54% for apps that departments select for themselves.  Small surprise: the average marketing departments uses 44 SaaS apps, which is fewer than most other departments.

If you’re collecting stats on CDP usage, 25% of brand marketers surveyed for Winterberry Group have a CDP and another 9% plan to add one.  That compares with 58% having an enterprise data warehouse and 65% with a marketing database.  The main thrust of the study is customer journey management, and Winterberry concludes that the going so far has been rough: it finds just 17% of companies are “journey focused”, while 58% are still organized around campaigns.  Download for detailed maturity models, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I tried to take a couple of days off from talking about cookies, but the News Gods insist.  First they sent this admission from Facebook that Apple’s tighter privacy policies have made ad targeting and tracking more difficult, resulting in under-counted iOS web conversions by about 15%.  They don’t quite admit that their targeting itself is probably less effective, but that’s also likely.

Next, CDP ActionIQ launched an “Advertiser CDP Solution” that combines a data collection tag, integration with third-party identifiers, prebuilt audience lookalike models for ad targeting, and integrations with ad buying platforms.  If you think they’re trying to elbow DMP vendors out of the picture, you’re probably right.

Finally, we have Shopify helping its clients adjust by integrating Yahoo’s cookie-free  Connect ID for ad targeting.  The deal will let Shopify merchants target (and retarget) ads at individuals across the 3,000-plus publisher domains that support Yahoo’s Connect ID.

More than half (59%) of the respondents to this Treasure Data martech survey are in IT, which probably explains why they rated security as the most important evaluation consideration (58%), far ahead of cost (38%), scalability (38%), or integration (37%). The group ranked CDP as the top marketing stack technology (68%), although the list of choices didn’t include stalwarts such as email, marketing automation, or CRM. Download for more.

In the on-going plague that is Facebook, I could mention The New York Times’ report that they are pushing their own propaganda through the News Feed or that the ad industry proposes to “combat” social media hate speech without cutting off the ad spending that funds it. But let’s instead offer a ray of hope: Blackbird.ai has raised $10 million for its platform to quickly detect and respond to social media disinformation campaigns.

Staying positive, let’s look at alternatives to Big Tech-based online media. One growing channel is retailer-based media networks, which Catalina is nurturing with a bundle of products and services that make them easier for retailers to deploy. Anther is the audio advertising, which iHeartMedia subsidiary Triton Digital is supporting with a marketplace, due early next year, that will aggregate 100 billion monthly impressions across broadcast radio, podcast, and streaming audio.

We have lots to discuss today, Dear Reader.  First, digital experience platform Optimizely (bought last year by Episerver, which then took its name) has launched a new set of unified insights and data services to meld its collection of acquired products.  The data foundation is the Zaius CDP, which Optimizely bought this past March.