Gartner also has a new CMO study. Their anti-conventional wisdom is: most marketers believe they should collaborate with other departments when building their digital roadmap, but results are actually better when marketers act independently. I think the other findings were less surprising but the jargon was too thick to be sure.
If you don’t like the CDP Institute’s survey, you can read this CMO research from GfK. They asked different questions but the answers still rhyme: lack of systems to connect data silos ranked as the top barrier to achieving full data potential, cited by 64% of North American CMOs, and 69% listed data management as the leading obstacle to data access. Global CMOs had somewhat different answers.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), which includes all the EU regulators, has ruled Facebook and Instagram (owned by Meta) can’t require accepting targeted ads as a condition of joining the network. If leaked details of the ruling are correct and this practice is deemed in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the decision would have broad impact well beyond Meta. This is because it would limit companies from using data they directly collect on their own site.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.