CDP Institute

Next, a particularly interesting survey from Acxiom about identity solutions.  Just 19% of respondents said their companies have implemented a third-party cookie replacement plan and only 34% have a plan in place.  Even fewer have mature plans for master identities across martech and adtech.  First party data and CDPs are the most important components of their expected solutions.  Lots more here.

Finally, let’s pay some rare attention to small business marketers. Roku has launched an app that lets merchants buy streaming TV ads through Shopify.  UZE has created a self-service platform that lets small advertisers place ads on vehicle-mounted digital displays across Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. And all-in-one digital marketing platform Sendinblue has become aller-in-one and indulged its fetish for odd company names by purchasing Chatra (messaging), Metrilo (ecommerce analytics), and PushOwl (web push).

Holy Grail or Great White Whale?  Either way, lots of people are chasing fully automated marketing campaigns.  Oracle just joined the quest with Fusion Marketing, which automates some functions and guides marketers through manual steps for others.  The most automated bits include B2B advertising audience generation, reference story selection, company-specific microsites with auto-selected case histories, and AI-powered lead qualification and distribution.

Adobe is also pressing for increased automation, and just proudly announced that over 80% of Experience Cloud customers are using at least one AI-powered feature.  Huzzah.  The latest additions to their AI menagerie are automated marketing mix modeling and marketing spend optimization based on estimates of the incremental impact of specific marketing touchpoints.

Our friends at D4t4 Solutions have their own automation news: they’ve added nearly 100 new preconfigured marketing signals to their Celebrus CDP. The new signals will combine behaviors with historical data to flag customers most likely to convert.  They’re tailored to travel and hospitality, telecommunications, and healthcare industries.  Celebrus already had similar signals for banking and insurance.

You haven’t read here about Gartner’s July report that marketing budgets fell dramatically in 2021 because the result was so far out of line with other surveys that it didn’t seem worth mentioning. But Duke Fuqua’s latest The CMO Survey solves the mystery: like Gartner, they report that marketing budgets fell as a percentage of revenues, from 13.2% in 2020 to 8.6% in 2021 (Gartner’s numbers were 11% to 6.4%). Unlike Gartner, Duke Fuqua also reports marketing spend as a share of company budgets rose from 11.7% to 12.1%, clarifying... Read More >

Speaking of things we don’t mention, that includes stories getting tons of attention in the general media, since I assume you’re reading those at the source.  But I’ll make an exception for the Wall Street Journal exposé of on Facebook, which documents with new depth just how knowingly harmful they have been.  Anyone who supports Facebook with ad spending or even by being a member should really think again.

Back to our usual programming: as privacy changes make online ads less targetable, the measurability of Connected TV (CTV) becomes more appealing to mass advertisers.  CTV ad platform Innovid is narrowing the gap with Innovid Key, which collects ad viewer data from over 25 device types in 95 million homes, ties it to Innovid’s own ID graph, and lets advertisers link to external keys from publishers, clean rooms, and other ID partners.  It’s one of many approaches to tracking on CTV devices.

I’d rather share news about products and industry events than yet another survey, Dear Reader, but the tons of CDP information in this Merkle study make it irresistible.  One key finding: 61% of tech people say they have a CDP compared with just 37% of marketers, suggesting different definitions.  Then again, 59% said their CDP is being used primarily for data consolidation, which is a pretty firm consensus.  An impressive 97% say their CDP is meeting expectations (52%) or exceeding them (45%).  Lots more here.

Switching back to product news, Adobe Experience Platform has integrated Yahoo’s ConnectID cookiless identifier, which is based on hashed IDs from opted-in Yahoo customers.  The deal will make it easier for Adobe clients to build custom audience segments and target them through Yahoo’s platforms.  (As one of our readers pointed out recently, marketers need to look closely at the coverage provided by these sorts of deals.)

Sticking with identity products: Zeta, which has 225 million American consumers in its own identity graph (as well as a CDP) has partnered with travel data collector Adara to create the Traveler Data Cloud.  Adara collects first party travel signals from over 300 global brands, so the combination will help companies run personalized travel-related marketing programs across advertising, email, Web, and other channels.

Salesforce announced a slew of features boosting its personalization capabilities, most notably AI-driven engagement scoring drawing on data in the Salesforce CDP.  Other additions include tighter integration of Interaction Studio with Experience Cloud, Datorama, and CRM, and of Dataorama with Salesforce CDP.  In case you’re wondering, a “slew” is more than a bunch but less than a bucket.