Respondents to Duke Fuqua’s long-running The CMO Survey were in a cheery mood, with the highest optimism scores in three years and 72% believing that marketing has grown more important during the pandemic. The good vibes extended to their view of customers, whom they felt value a good experience more than product quality, trust, service, price, and innovation. Data integration for customer tracking is their fastest-growing investment.
Marketers in this CleverTap survey also seemed remarkably down-to-earth. They listed segment-level campaigns as their most important use for customer data (75%), while personalized customer messages ranked sixth at 46%. They also said lack of quality customer data is their top internal pain point (42%), far ahead of lacking real-time data (25%). Lots more here including key issues by industry, which are always intriguing.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s AI working group just released a set of AI use cases for marketing. The eight use cases are…oh, just click and read it for yourself. And while you’re clicking, take a look at the IAB Tech Lab’s new set of proposed standards for addressability and privacy practices.
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.