Customer Data Platforms are the top investment priority for e-commerce marketers, with 65% planning to increase spend in 2019. This from a study by Oracle and the CommerceNext conference. Bad news is that unified customer data is also the most disappointing of 2018 investments, with 52% saying results fell below expectations. Personalization and omni-channel marketing were almost as disappointing, at 51% and 47%. This stuff is hard.
Location tracking vendor Foursquare has purchased location tracking vendor Placed, bulking up its data collection and expanding its online-to-offline advertising attribution capabilities. Seller was Snap, which purchased Placed two years ago. Price was not announced but apparently not much more than the $125 to $135 million that Snap paid.
Apple doesn’t make its money from customer data, so it can more easily take the privacy high road. They’ve announced changes to their Safari Web browser that will let advertisers capture ad clicks for campaign measurement without tying the clicks to identifiable individuals. It will limit first-party as well as third-party data, so if you’re a marketer, you’re likely to be affected.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.