CDP Institute

The fundamental challenge posed by loss of existing third party data is creating large-scale advertising audiences. Content recommendation companies like Taboola and Outbrain already offer themselves as an alternative way to achieve scale. The two firms just announced a merger with Taboola as the survivor. So more of an acquisition, really.

The search for scale is really a quest for independence from Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Connected TV is another escape path offered by many players. One is Wurl, which just launched AdPool, a marketplace for video producers to sell their connected TV inventories. The scale is there: connected TV now accounts for half of all video ad impressions, according to this Extreme Reach study.

Lots of small-but-significant news today, Dear Reader. Oracle has purchased cloud-based loyalty platform CrowdTwist. Industry trends illustrated: marketers focus on full life cycle, not just acquisition; cross-channel orchestration; shift to cloud; expanded scope for enterprise marketing vendors; prebuilt campaigns to speed deployment.

Easy-to-use data and process integration platform SnapLogic has raised $72 million, bringing its total to $208 million since 2007. Trends illustrated: need for cross-system integration; appeal of self-service; AI-assisted systems; martech funding for infrastructure projects. Trend not illustrated: CDP, since SnapLogic doesn’t create a persistent database.

Adtech vendor MediaMath has pledged to deliver a “100 percent accountable and addressable supply chain by the end of 2020”, via a cooperative project called SOURCE. It’s a bit unclear what’s involved (at least to me), but the commitment to “righting the wrongs of a digital advertising industry” that has “gotten lost in fraud, waste, and irrelevance” taps into a mad-as-hell-and-we-won’t-take-it spirit within the advertising world and beyond.

Another sign of peak martech? Investment firm LUMA found the number of martech deals rose just slightly (42 to 45) in Q3 of this year, while the value of publicly traded martech firms actually fell. Deal volume in digital content and Direct-to-Consumer rose much more. The report mentions last month’s purchase by Zeta Global of CDP vendor IgnitionOne’s legacy DSP business, which slipped under this newsletters’ radar.

Blockchain investments are usually too speculative to be worth a mention. But we’ll make an exception for BurstIQ’s $5.5 million Series A because the company has an actual product with a useful application: managing healthcare data to allow both sharing and privacy protection.

Switching gears, this Invoca survey found that data quality is the most common obstacle to using customer data to optimize ad performance (46%). Privacy is next (42%), followed by too much data (31%) and collecting data from silos (28%). It’s a helpful reminder about a problem that’s easy to overlook when you’re planning that oh-so-sexy CDP.

Should business users work independently of IT? No prizes for guessing that 70% of IT workers think it’s a bad idea while 69% of business users think it’s good. Both sides agree their organization would benefit from “low code” platforms that make development easier for whoever does the work. Also no prize for guessing that survey sponsor Mendix offers a low-code platform.

If anything requires coordination between business and IT, it’s improving customer experience. This Cyara survey found that companies with more experience in CX projects were 87% more likely to report shared understanding between business and IT and 81% more likely to report CX.. A majority (58%) said pressure to move too quickly had created CX problems.

Speaking of customer experience, consultancy COPC found consumer satisfaction with multichannel experience reached the lowest point in the eight years they’ve been keeping score, falling to 38% from 57% in 2018. There’s plenty more in this 75 page report so let’s just pull one factoid: only 60% of respondents said they’d used the phone to resolve a service issue in the past year.

It’s Eat Your Spinach Day here at CDP Institute, when we publish important news you probably won’t read. We’ll start with a $44 million Series B for Fivetran, which offers automated data integration technology that can build custom connectors in minutes. This is generic technology that could compete with Customer Data Platforms.