CDP Institute

Retreating to less controversial ground, this study from CDP Arm Treasure Data finds that marketers’ biggest challenge in gaining insights from their data is that it’s siloed and hard to access (cited by 47%). Just 20% cited the next most common challenge, lack of internal knowhow. The survey also found substantial shortfalls in attribution approaches.

Maybe you don’t trust a CDP vendor’s survey about data integration. Well, Adobe is definitely not a CDP vendor and their recent Digital Trends Report by Econsultancy also found that building a holistic customer view is marketers’ top challenge (44%), followed by tracking marketing effectiveness (41%) and ensuring consistent experience (40%). Even more impressive: 32% of customer experience leaders had a highly integrated cloud-based technology stack compared with just 7% of non-leaders. More here about priorities, impact of data privacy rules, and other interesting topics.

More big tech news: Facebook is trying to grow its commercial software business by recruiting partners to push Workplace, a private version of Facebook shared among a company’s employees. Facebook’s goal is probably to gather personal data that’s unprotected by consumer privacy regulations. But you could also see this as entry into martech.

Spent yesterday binge-watching Battlestar Galactica again?  We won’t judge.  We will let you know that Salesforce announced a $15.7 billion stock deal to buy data visualization platform Tableau. The goal is less to improve analytics within Salesforce than to drive continued revenue growth by tapping into the general ‘digital transformation’ market. Tableau will continue to operate as an independent company.

In other corporate drama, European adtech vendor Weborama is trying to disrupt Amazon’s deal to buy Sizmek’s ad server and creative optimization tools. Since Sizmek’s bankruptcy overseers have already approved the Amazon deal and Weborama has no hope of outbidding Amazon, this looks like an attempt to boost the purchase price – or maybe just grab some publicity.

The News Gods have apparently adopted summer hours, since nothing of interest happened on Friday. That lets us catch up on some Artificial Intelligence items that we didn’t get to earlier in the week. We’ll start with LogMeIn, which is expanding beyond remote access software to offer an AI-powered Bold360 customer engagement suite. It will deliver customer support, advisory, and shopping bots and bot-powered advice to customer-facing employees.

Customer engagement vendor Pega has decided the problem with AI is consumers feel it lacks empathy. They’re solving that by letting companies decide how much weight the AI should give to customer interests vs. business value. The company also released research showing that consumers have more trust in people than AI but are highly skeptical of both.

Chatbot vendor Aivo has a more positive view of AI’s results, reporting that its clients found chatbots could resolve 65% of e-commerce customer inquiries. It found most questions were requests for information not found on a company’s Web site, which chatbots were good at providing. Download for interesting details on chatbot deployment.

Google announced a deal to buy business analytics software vendor Looker for $2.6 billion. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Google’s existing cloud database products by letting users create shared business metrics and develop applications. Looker will continue to run on all cloud database platforms.

Microsoft and Oracle have their own cloud database news: they’re linking their systems to share data and let applications running in one cloud use data stored in the other. The deal should expand the market for Oracle applications to companies that prefer to keep their data in Microsoft Azure. CDP users get more choices in where to host their systems.

A few CDP users really care where their system is hosted. The rest are more likely to be interested that Criteo lists a dozen CDP vendors as partners in its Global Audience program. The new program will make it easier for marketers to match their customers against Criteo’s audiences, which can then be used to target ads at the customers across digital ad channels.

We reported last week on an Oracle survey that found CDPs were ecommerce companies’ the top investment priority, news that’s delightful if unlikely to be correct. This survey from ActionIQ and Ascendant Network found 20% of companies have a CDP, compared with 82% having CRM, 57% having a data lake or warehouse, and 54% having a DMP. Much more realistic. Worth reading for details on what data companies use, how long they keep it, how well they coordinate across channels.