CDP Institute

Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.

Time Inc. owns some digital properties, including online advertising and identity aggregator Viant.

All that growth doesn’t mean marketers are doing a great job managing their money. A study from ID Comms found that just 15% of advertisers say they’re using media technology effectively, even though 75% agree they need a clear adtech strategy. Good news for some of us: specialist tech consultants are the most trusted adtech advisors.

Fabled magazine publisher Time Inc. is being bought by slightly-less-fabled publisher Meredith Corporation for $2.8 billion cash. The $18.50 share price is a 46% premium over the stock’s recent level but well under the $25.95 all-time high in 2015. Meredith’s investment is supported by $650 million from the arch-conservative Koch brothers, who promise no involvement in editorial decisions. Sure.

I had intended to focus on good news today, in the Thanksgiving Spirit and all that.

Of course, those brand values don’t do anything for consumers.

But let’s end on a positive note: three firms that I classify as Customer Data Platforms made it onto the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list issued last week. They were Datorama (ranked 35 with 5,149% growth rate), Signal (rank 193 with 548% growth rate), and Tealium (rank 195 with 538% growth rate). Congratulations to them and happy Thanksgiving to all.

It’s not your imagination: the online audience aggregators (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) really are coming under unprecedented pressure. It’s not just lagging indicators like the New York Times finally noticing there’s a problem, Verto Analytics, which gathers behavior from measurement apps on consumer devices, found that Facebook time fell 32.7 hours per month in 2016 to 18.5 hours in 2017. Other social media services showed growth. Let’s face it: attention spans are short and people are not as obsessed with Facebook as they used to be.

Social media’s influence is a matter of trust as well as time. Separate studies by research agency Kantar and native ad content vendor Sharethrough found that social media is less far trusted than traditional publishers as a news source. Not surprising but you can’t take anything for granted these days.

And what about loyalty?

Customer Data Platform vendor BlueVenn announced a strategic partnership with Throtle, which helps companies connect online to offline identities. What’s interesting is such integrations have usually been done as clients request them; this makes the integration more part of BlueVenn’s standard offering.

B2B data company Madison Logic has also made it easier for clients to access external data. They’ve recently exposed data and analytics from their ActivateABM marketing platform to CRM systems, where individual salespeople can see them.