Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.
Salesforce still doesn’t call its Datorama acquisition a Customer Data Platform, but they’re continuing to evolve it in CDP-like directions. Latest steps include expanded options to build custom integrations, tighter integration with Salesforce’s own systems, and custom triggers to let other systems act on Datorama results. The focus is still on campaign-level data, not individual customers. But AdExchanger reports that connectors to CRM and other first-party sources are in the works, pulling Datorama ever closer to CDP applications.
If trust levels do improve, one reason might be that governments are seen as doing a better job of protecting their citizens. News that the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) fined Google $57 million for GDPR violations could be a step in the right direction. While $57 million is about three hours’ worth of revenue for Google, what matters is the potential for much higher fines in the future.
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.