CDP Institute

Down at the simpler end of the spectrum, this report from Litmus finds that email remains a workhorse channel for most marketers, and in fact has become even more important since last year. The really good news is that users have become more sophisticated, with the more now doing tests and personalizing on advanced data including past interactions (up from 27% to 40%) and purchases (from 38% to 60%).

Here are two studies that agree the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation but disagree on how. A Forrester study for MediaMonks found that marketers have become more innovative: their new top priority is accelerating digital experience initiatives (61%) and their next phase of digital transformation will focus on virtual experiences (72%). Meanwhile, Spiceworks Ziff Davis found that IT managers have pulled back investments in advanced technology to focus on immediate needs including security, cloud migrations, and remote worker support. Could be a marketer vs IT thing.

No-code app builder Airtable has raised a $185 million Series D, bringing its total to $355 million. The company also announced more automation and data management features plus “low-code” custom apps that require writing JavaScript. Make of that what you will.

Marketing operations teams are likely users of self-built solutions to make their jobs easier. This Gartner survey about marketing ops honestly doesn’t say much of interest but, hey, it’s from Gartner so you’ll probably want to take a look.

Experience analytics platform Medallia is paying $44 million to buy Sense360, which gathers and analyzes consumer location, transaction, and survey data. The company calls the deal a “game changer”, which may be stretching it. But a bit more consumer behavior did just come into sharper focus. Make of that what you will, too.

Oracle has reportedly told advertisers its Oracle Data Cloud DMP will stop offering third-party targeting data to customers in Europe. Cookie-based collection of such data has looked increasingly like a GDPR violation and the decision may have been hastened by class action lawsuits filed in August against Oracle and Salesforce.

Marketers have grown more fearful of artificial intelligence since the pandemic began, according to R.R. Donnelley research. Concern that AI or machine learning would limit their personal growth grew from 14% in late 2019 to 59% in mid-2020. Worry that AI and ML would reduce creativity and intuition grew from 27% to 68%. Lots more here of interest.

One sign that AI is taking over will be marketing campaigns designed for AI to manage. Right on cue, our friends at Facebook have limited the number of ad variations allowed per page so their machine learning tools can learn more quickly which versions work best. Did you really need yet another sign of the apocalypse?

Next, a tasty acquisition: customer service platform Astute is buying social media marketing platform Socialbakers. The deal gives Astute more marketing capabilities and access to Socialbakers’ 2,500+ client brands. Yummy.

Our final pairing is GumGum and Dentsu Aegis, who partnered to find that contextual ads are more cost-efficient than behavior-based placements. The test was exceptionally well-designed and documented, which isn’t always true for such studies. The answer matters because many advertisers are wondering whether contextual targeting can replace behavioral targeting, which relies heavily on those soon-to-vanish third party cookies.

We have an unexpected glut of worthy items today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with something for you no-code fans: Google has launched Business Application Platform, which combines its Apigee API management and AppSheet no-code development platform. Sadly, neither is headless, so I can’t say two headlesses are better than one.

We can’t call customer experience technology “CXtech”, for obvious reasons. But we do have a lot of news about it today. We’ll start with a $200 million raise for unified customer experience platform Sprinklr, bringing its total to $587.5 million.