CDP Institute

Those “martech generalists” will be hard to find: an Economist Group study for the Digital Marketing Institute finds that it’s already harder to recruit for data and analytics skills than customer experience, strategy and planning, or anything else. The same study found that technical skills are most needed by marketing departments, rating higher than creativity, analytical thinking, or marketing itself.

Marketers hire agencies when they lack in-house skills. Eying the martech talent gap, Interpublic Group spent $2 billion last year to purchase data-driven marketing services company Acxiom. They’ve now launched Kinesso, which will rely on Acxiom to create applications that use data to improve media results. Kinesso will also incorporate Cadreon, Interpublic’s addressable media activation unit.

Today we offer random product news. Campaign Monitor has purchased ecommerce email system Conversio and relaunched it as CM Commerce. It’s Campaign Monitor’s fifth acquisition in a little over a year, the others being Liveclicker, Sailthru, Delivra and Emma.

Next, a $31.5 million Series A for Contentstack, a combination headless content management system and digital experience platform.

Finally, Kubient has launched a real time bidding solution for digital out of home advertising. Because you never know when you’ll feel that sudden urge to buy a billboard.

A study for the California Attorney General (download here) estimated compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) could cost as much as $55 billion. It’s a headline-grabbing figure although probably much too high: a key assumption is that almost 75% of California businesses have lists of more than 50,000 consumers. Think about the small businesses you know and how many are likely to have a list that large. Still, it helps to remind businesses that CCDPA is coming in January.

Plenty of vendors are eager to help companies comply with CCPA and other privacy rules. Titus and BigID both offer services to identify personal data that needs to be protected. Titus recently launched Titus Accelerator. BigID just announced a global reseller agreement with SAP.

Start-up Osano is tackling a different privacy challenge: helping consumers and businesses know which companies have good privacy practices. They’ve measured practices of more than 7,000 companies and share the results with businesses and consumers. They also offer a consent management tool. Osano was founded in 2018 and has $3 mlilion in seed funding.

And what about the cost of not switching? Rigidities of legacy and in-house systems were the most-cited obstacle (59%) to digital agility in this Episerver survey of B2B marketers. A CDP could help but just 17% plan to buy one, far below plans for Web analytics (51%) and email (49%).

Legacy systems were also cited as the biggest barrier to GDPR compliance in this Capgemini report (38%), followed closely by the complexity of regulations (36%) and cost (33%). Surprisingly, more companies the U.S. reported full compliance (35%) than in any European country. More than 80% of compliant firms saw gains in customer trust, improvements in IT systems, cybersecurity, and organizational transformation.

Despite all the martech products available today, custom software is alive and well.  About 60% of US and UK marketers told Mailjet they have built their own marketing technology and another 20% have a project under way. Home-grown systems are harder to use but the cost of switching keeps many companies locked in. Click here for a summary and here for tons of interesting detail on pros and cons of each option.

Any remaining hope that current online data sharing practices would somehow survive pretty much died this week, when the European Union’s highest court ruled that placing any cookie requires “active consent” – as in ticking an unticked-by-default check box – and that cookies for data sharing can’t be combined with cookies for other purposes. The ruling also specifies that consent language clearly identify the third parties that will gain access to the data.