If you just can’t wait to sell your personal data, the good folks at Dabbl have already opened a “trustworthy attention marketplace” that pays consumers for interacting with brand advertising. As Dabbl points out, it gives consumers “something smart and satisfying to do in their downtime” on their smartphone. No wasted time talking to Mom or seeing what Sean had for lunch.
We seem to have a “customer behavior” theme this week. I don’t know why but let’s go with it. A study from marketing services consultancy Lavidge finds that tech buyers rely most on colleagues and friends, search engines, and vendor Web sites as data sources during product discovery, while paying less attention to case studies, industry reports, blogs, and advertising in general. No prizes for guessing that cold call telemarketing is the least favorite of all.
Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.
The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.