I couldn’t find any other product news worth mentioning, so here’s some “anti-product news” instead: programmatic software vendor Centro found that 51% of marketers and 30% of agencies feel they have too many tools already. Most work with more than a dozen ad tech tools and routinely use several tools that do the same thing. You won’t be surprised that unified measurement and data integration are major pain points.
This notion of consumers selling their own data just won’t go away. This newsletter has covered several vendors and our sister blog Customer Experience Matrix recently took a deeper look. Now here’s a MarTech piece announcing yet another product, from SRAX, and casually mentioning two others, Datum and Data Wallet. As the Customer Experience Matrix piece shows, business models vary considerably and many of these are more about building advertising audiences than paying people for their data. Seller beware.
I wouldn’t usually mention that omnichannel messaging tool Iterable has integrated with direct mail production platform Inkit. But it fits today’s topic and there’s not much else to report. So I just did.
Google has given up on its FLoC cookie-less targeting initiative, which faced insurmountable privacy objections. The replacement, which mercifully does not reference anything bird-related, is Topics API, which will offer three recent interests for each individual based on sites they have recently visited. The loss in targeting and tracking power is so huge that you wonder if Google is purposely showing what tighter privacy is costing the industry. Or maybe they’re just kneecapping competitors.