Data management isn’t the glamorous part of marketing, but avoiding it has tremendous costs. A study from integration vendor SnapLogic estimates U.S. and U.K. companies are losing $140 billion each year, including lost time, wasted resources and missed opportunities. Lack of collaboration and departmental turf-guarding are the biggest obstacles to integration; lack of technology ranks sixth. Lots of other good information.
The European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for anti-trust violations by favoring its own shopping services in search results.
Using AI to generate insights and recommendations is a hot trend right now. One example: Engagement Labs has added predictive analytics to measure the impact on sales of different social influence metrics and a simulator to show the sales results of possible changes. Second example: Unmetric has launched an artificial-intelligence-powered system that monitors competitive behavior on social media and identifies what worked best.
Reports emerged at the weekend that Salesforce was in advanced talks to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica. The deal would be Salesforce’s largest since acquiring Slack in 2021, and shares fell 7% Monday on the news. Informatica would add more advanced technical capabilities to the Salesforce product line.