Let’s do product news today. IBM has several recent announcements including AI-powered interactive advertisements (pretty cool), an AI-based programmatic ad bid optimizer, and AI-based audience targeting in conjunction with LiveRamp. Yesterday also saw the formal release of Watson Assistant for Marketing, a natural language reporting interface for IBM’s Campaign and digital marketing platforms that was announced last month.
Let’s skip today’s product news, which is all pretty minor. Instead, here’s Reltio, a Master Data Management vendor that also qualifies as a CDP, announcing they’ll support Salesforce Customer 360 and the Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and Salesforce. As if they had a choice. I liked how clear they made their real opinion of those approaches: “Common IDs and tight coupling of apps can solve some immediate problems, but in the long run still create new islands of data that ultimately spell trouble for customer 360 initiatives.”
Switching to internal data, a study from data governance vendor ASG Technologies finds that half of CIOs report all or most of their data management initiatives are focused on compliance. In other words, if marketers get their feeling their data needs are not top priority, they’re probably right. The study also reported that 81% of IT teams use enterprise data compared with just 63% of marketing teams. It’s plausible that many marketing teams use only non-enterprise data but what, exactly, are those 19% of IT teams working with?
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.