CDP Institute

Two-thirds (67%) of customer engagement leaders say their organization has too many overlapping point solutions, but 58% still feel their martech solutions are well integrated, according to this Forrester survey for Acoustic.  Although 99% all are collecting some type of customer behavior signals, only 32% say they can easily analyze them.

Data quality (50%) and fragmentation (47%) are top obstacles gaining data insights, data and IT professionals report in this TWDI survey.  The report says 13% are prioritizing a composable CDP instead of a traditional CDP as a way to make things better, although it doesn’t say how many have a traditional CDP in place.

Things are looking up on the investment front.  Fifty-three percent of VC managers expect to put more money into startups this year than last, according to Kaufman Fellows. This is supported by Crunchbase findings from Q1 with venture funding up 14% on Q4, 2023. Worse news for established start-ups: around 30% of Kauffman Fellows surveyed thought 2024 will be a tough year for exits.

GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP” because it can extract audiences from Google BigQuery databases.  A complete CDP has many other capabilities but that’s a topic for another day.  GrowthLoop’s news is they now use Google’s Gemini generative AI tools to recommend target audiences.

LinkedIn has announced that it has connected TV ads in testing, designed to use first-party data to reach audiences selected from its community of one billion professionals. NBCU will be LinkedIn’s initial partner. Targeting is currently limited to the United States and Canada and CTV campaigns must be built in Campaign Manager.

Global mobile consumer spend with soar by 267% to $2.2 trillion by 2030 according to app analytics platform data.ai. The report also forecasts 2.9 trillion global downloads and almost 16 billion hours spent per day. Despite these mammoth figures, the CAGR in each case will be lower between now and 2030 than it was between 2017 and 2023, perhaps reflecting the diminishing numbers of non-mobile users out there.

Google parent Alphabet is said to be considering making an offer to acquire HubSpot. Anonymous sources told Reuters that Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley advisers to discuss the possibility. HubSpot’s current market valuation is $32 billion.

Amazon is set to abandon its experiment with checkout-free grocery stores. Apparently automated, the process actually required more than 1,000 remote “cashiers” in India to monitor video of checkouts. This was followed by reports that AWS plans to eliminate hundreds of positions both in its physical stores and across its sales, marketing and global services divisions.

Retail media buyers can now target ads based on banking transactions of 80 million Chase Bank customers. Nothing creepy about that. The launch of Chase Media Solutions follows Chase’s 2022 acquisition and integration of Figg, the card-linked marketing platform.

Who says martech funding is dead?  Social reviews and commerce platform Flip just raised an impressive $144 million Series C, bringing total funding to $238.8 million.  Flip will also adapt AXON ad targeting technology from AppLovin, which provided $50 million of the new round.

Tech giants like Meta and Google may be increasingly skittish about news publishing, but spunky little Yahoo (a phrase we never thought we’d see) is jumping into the fray with the acquisition of news curation platform Artifact. The personalized news feeds adjust to users’ interests over time. As part of Yahoo, Artifact will deliver curated news to millions of users globally.

Are marketers paying too much attention to technology?  Well, they did tell Survey Monkey that “access to tools and resources” ranks as their top important success factor (44%), ahead of data and insights (43%), culture (41%) decision-making autonomy (39%), efficiency (39%) and stakeholder buy-in (33%). “Changes in tools and software” rose from fifth place to second in their list of challenges (49%), nearly tied with increasing performance expectations (50%) and strategy changes (48%). Still, their top goal was more personalized marketing (55%)..