CDP Institute

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.

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.

Publishers are using third party data to supplement their own information. Location data compiler Factual and Digiday found that 85% of publishers buy third party data, primarily to extend the scale of their own information. They also found that geotargeteing is now mainstream: 76% of publishers usually or always do it.

We’re seeing a new round of scare headlines as companies realize they’re not ready for GDPR, the strict European Union privacy regulations that go into effect next May. It’s an opportunity for Customer Data Platform vendors, whose solutions can help companies meet GDPR requirements to show data they’re storing about consumers  and allow changes or deletions. Segment has just announced new capabilities to do this; so have others including Fospha, RedEye, BlueVenn (all UK-based), Tealium, and mParticle.

This newsletter has written more about GDPR than our readers wanted to see.