CDP Institute

Trying to put these changes in context? Here’s help: the CDP Institute just released its semi-annual industry update, now covering more than 50 vendors. We look at changes in vendor counts, funding and employment by region and product type. Fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing. And you are.

Let’s wind up the year with some topics that we expect to be important in 2018. We’ll start with a pair of studies from video production tool vendor Magisto, which found American businesses spent $135 billion in 2017 on all types of video (not just marketing). The primary distribution channels are social media and company Web sites, so money for video is coming out of paid advertising budgets. Kind of a big deal.

The power of video is its ability to attract attention in world where buyers ignore most paid advertising. Multi-channel messaging vendor Ytel argues in this study that voicemail and SMS are other channels that break through the clutter, at least for B2B selling. They note that people listen to 97% of voicemails and open up to 97% of SMS messages within a six minutes, while email has a 22% read rate.  Yet email continues to dominate marketing budgets. Good point.

Or should we go full retro and predict the rebirth of TV? Quite possible, so long as a it’s a modern, interactive TV that’s as good at spying on you personalizing your experience as your computer or mobile device. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on three companies leading the way.

I can’t quite decide if this item is significant, but it’s pretty clear there won’t be much real news this week, so what the heck.

And, let’s face it, the bloom has faded from the programmatic rose. On the one hand, we have reports like this one from the Conference Board’s Society for New Communications Research, that 42% of marketers don’t know where all their ads run and as a result worry about brand safety. And then there’s this one from IRI that finds ads on relevant sites perform 30% better than ads targeted at individuals regardless of the context. Context-free targeting is how programmatic works.

Still, programmatic is far from dead. This ANA study reports it accounts for 78% of digital display spending and the share continues to increase. But the ANA confirmed that marketers have brand safety concerns and found that 35% of marketers taking over more programmatic work from their agencies. Already, 47% own their tech provider contracts and 32% do their own audience planning on a DMP. There’s considerably more in this study: it’s worth a download if you’re interested in the topic.

The line between customer-facing and back-office software is rapidly vanishing. GK Software mostly builds retail Point of Sale systems, but they’ve expanded to other channels and adjacent functions such as merchandising and promotion management. They just announced they’ll be using artificial intelligence to generate personalized product recommendations, dynamic pricing and promotions, smart shopping lists, and individualized newsletters. These can be delivered via POS, mobile POS, and self-service channels. You can bet there’s a customer database lurking somewhere underneath.

Reaching buyers during checkout is often too late. The 2018 Retail Consumer Survey from barcode scanner vendor Scandit not surprisingly suggests that barcode scanning can help. They offer many clever examples. Still, the most sobering data in this survey is that price is by far the most important factor in selecting a retailer: it was cited by 55% of respondents, followed by stocking preferred brands (18%), merchandise selection (13%), and, oh there it is: customer service (10%).

So, is it game over for retailers? Should they turn their stores into vast couch showrooms and sell popcorn as customers purchase online? The seriously smart folks at Retail Systems Research don’t think so: they’ve found that successful retailers feel employees should take the initiative in engaging with customers, not just wait for technology to tell them what to do. And, RSR argues employers should invest in quality workers – even raising wages! – to make this possible. That’s crazy talk.

Earned media budgets may indeed be growing fastest, but the bulk of the spend is on social media, not conventional public relations. Sagefrog’s eleventh annual B2B Marketing Mix Report found social media tied with email as the most implemented marketing tactic (79%), while conventional public relations ranked ninth at 29%. Read this to see how your marketing mix compares with the Jones’.

B2B data aggregator Leadspace has added $21 million Series C funding, bringing total raise to $56 million. Leadspace assembles data from public and private sources, combines it with a client’s own data, and uses artificial intelligence to create lead scores and alerts.