CDP Institute

This Forrester study for IBM found that 71% of senior adtech managers are exploring privacy-friendly data sets as a way of coping with cookie deprecation.  This compares with just 49% trying to build trust to improve voluntary sharing, even though the group said loss of consumer trust is the biggest problem with new privacy rules.  Nearly all agreed that personalization expectations are rising (91%), that privacy makes personalized advertising harder (87%), and that privacy regulations put traditional targeting and tracking methods at risk (87%).  Privacy-safe targeting was the most-cited use... Read More >

PwC found that marketing leaders say martech is their highest priority for the next twelve months (43%), ranking just ahead of customer experience, personalization, and loyalty (39%).  Data privacy straggled in sixth at 29%.   When asked about planned operational changes, the group put better content management first (54%), followed closely by increased use of technology (51%), improved data management for personalization (49%), and first-party data strategies (46%).

Sitecore has continued its acquisition spree with the purchase of ecommerce site search platform Reflektion.  The company already calls itself the “global leader in digital experience management software”, so perhaps this makes it the galactic leader.  It’s Sitecore’s fourth acquisition this year, following the Boxever CDP, Four51 ecommerce engine, and Moosend email platform.

Account-based marketing platform 6sense makes no claim to galactic dominance, but its home page headline “Know everything so you can do anything” carries its own whiff of excess.  Returning to reality, they just bought Fortella, which offers pipeline planning, forecasting and measurement tools.  Readers with a long memory or Crunchbase account will recall that 6sense bought B2B CDP ZenIQ back in 2018.

This survey by Aberdeen for Reltio is three-kitten irresistible since it measures the value of unified customer data.  TLDR: companies with unified customer data are more successful than the rest in oh so many ways.  Download for deets.

It’s a potpourri today, Dear Reader. Here’s news that rockstar martech investors Vista Equity Partners have purchased a majority stake in conversational commerce vendor Drift, reportedly at a $1 billion-plus valuation. Details weren’t announced but I guess we can’t call Drift a chatbot vendor anymore.

Money may be your favorite topic but replacing third-party data is a close second, right?  Epsilon is integrating its CORE ID identity graph and data with the Salesforce CDP, making it easier to unify customer records and expanding cross-channel reach.  Salesforce CDP already had a similar deal with Dentsu Merkle’s Merkury and may have others I don’t know about.

If you’re more of a soap opera fan, nothing beats the tribulations of BigTech.  Our latest episode finds us in South Korea, where a new law blocks Apple and Google from requiring that all sales go through their payment systems, which charge monopoly-level commissions.  Apple just settled a U.S. class action suit without losing that right, but how long will the maintain it and where?  Stay tuned.

We have (mostly) good news about adtech today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a nice acquisition: brand safety vendor DoubleVerify is expanding in the European market by buying Meetrics, a Berlin-based firm with somewhat similar offerings.  Separately, DoubleVerify announced a partnership with Taboola, which will give Taboola’s advertisers more control over where their ads are placed.

Also cheery: this GeoEdge study finds that slightly more advertising said ad quality challenges got better (40%) than worse (35%) in the past year. By next year, more expect contextual fit to be their biggest challenge (51%) than brand safety (43%). This reverses years of increasing concern. Concerted industry efforts get credit, and let’s note that IAB Tech Lab has just launched a Transparency Center to further improve ad reliability.

A bit ambiguous: Moloco reports that mobile acquisition costs have grown by more than 200% for tracked users and 155% for non-tracked users since Apple introduced its enhanced privacy controls in iOS 14.5 in April.  That’s bad news for advertisers but good news for consumers whose privacy preferences are being respected.  Two thirds of ad bids (67.5%) now come from users who have opted out of tracking.

Welcome to “Trends Nobody Else Cares About Day” at CDP Institute. We’ll start with Gap Inc.’s acquisition of virtual fitting room app Drapr, which lets consumers try on clothes remotely. This one’s a two-fer: it illustrates the trend for retailers to buy tech companies rather than just using their products, and the trend of virtual dressing rooms, following Walmart’s purchase of Zeekit in May. Woot!