CDP Institute

Let’s stick with customer experience, although the news remains grim. A study from digital services vendor DimensionData finds that just 13% of organizations rate their customer experience at 9 of 10 or better, even though 71% say it’s their top strategic performance measure. Similarly, connected customer journeys via omnichannel solutions are the top-ranked technology trend for 2017 but 70% of companies have no or very few channels currently connected. A charmingly delusional 80% expect to have all or most channels connected within two years.

Ad agency Leo Burnett North America has combined several units to create an integrated data and analytic offering called The Core.

What, you don’t think ad agencies acquiring tech resources is a trend? Here’s more evidence: full service agency HY Connect just announced acquisition of Merge Design + Interactive, a specialist in building Web sites, mobile apps, social campaigns, and all other things digital. Acquisitions like this happen all the time. Trust.me.

Why the merger between creative and tech? It’s the customer experience, silly. An Econsultancy study for emarsys of Asia/Pacific marketers found that just 11% have a well developed strategy to improve customer experience and just 7% are seamlessly integrated across channels. Biggest barriers are experience complexity (44%), disjointed data (34%), and siloed organizations (34%). Marketing is in charge of customer experience more than half the time (54%), far more often than sales (12%), customer insight (6%), operations (5%), or customer service/support (4%). No one is charge 7% of the time.

Data quality and identity tool vendor Melissa has announced a “comprehensive customer data management platform” that combines Melissa’s data cleaning and enrichment with Pentaho data extraction, transformation, and loading. The combined solution, called Contact Zone, includes a drag-and-drop interface for building process flows and hundreds of integrated connectors to common source systems. It’s probably too technical to consider a CDP but it’s certainly something a company’s IT department could use to build their own unified customer database.

Social media platform Sprinklr has repositioned itself as a “unified platform for customer experience management (CXM)”. The system can ingest data from email, e-commerce, and other non-social sources to build a unified customer view, and can make this data available to external systems. It also provides extensive features for social and customer care interactions, paid media and audience management, and content management. It still seems to lack connections with customer-facing systems including web sites, email, and offline.

Ecommerce platform Magento has added new B2B capabilities including corporate account management, custom catalogs, real time inventory access, and backend integration with ERP, CRM, and other systems. Other announcements made at the company’s customer summit last week include: enhanced content management and social media features, integration with the Nostro personalization engine, and advanced shipping features.

Pyze gives mobile and Web app publishers advanced campaigns and analytics in a single package. It has just released an Enterprise Edition that can import data from external sources and manage customer experience across multiple applications. There’s a heavy dose of artificial intelligence for things like classifying data, identifying segments, and personalized messaging. If it seems wrong to isolate app marketing from everything else, bear in mind the target is app publishers who only have that one channel.

Google has announced a program to give marketing mix model providers better access to its media data. It provides spending details by campaign across all Google video, display and search properties in a standardized format. Initial partners include Marketing Management Analytics, Neustar Marketshare, and Nielsen.

Just 12% of companies have a separate digital marketing team while 81% have a mixed team, according to a survey from Technology for Marketing, Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing, and Pure360. Martech is “owned” by marketing alone at 12% of the companies, by IT only at 29%, and is shared between the two at 36%. Also some very interesting details on what’s done in-house vs. outsourced. Worth a look.

Alphonso also watches the OTT watchers, in its case through content recognition software embedded in more than 30 million smart TVs, gaming consoles, mobile apps, and other devices.

It’s Friday and I’m sure you have uplifting activities planned for the weekend: hiking in the Great Outdoors, visiting a science museum, building homes for the homeless, that sort of thing. What, your actual plan is to binge watch Westworld? For better or worse, you’re not alone: 70% of Americans do that at least once a month, according to this unusually interesting infographic on the trends in TV advertising. Lots of fun facts for marketing data geeks. From direct response agency Koeppel Direct.