Marketers are struggling to react quickly to customer behavior: half need more than one week to measure campaign impact, according to this CMO Council report. Even worse, just 29% orchestrate customer treatments based on real time behavior and 81% feel they are not fully meeting customer expectations. Disconnected systems and data complexity rank high on the list of obstacles.
Location data vendors Foursquare and Factual are merging. The combined firm will provide marketers with data on movements by more than 500 million devices worldwide, including a panel of 25 million always-on users. Foursquare bought Placed, another competitor, in May 2019.
Wrapping up in the same vein: digital asset management vendor Aprimo and AgileSherpas found that agile is just the best thing ever. Well, not in those words but 74% of marketers using agile were satisfied with team results, compared with 58% of traditional marketers and 34% of ad hoc marketers. Agile users reported higher productivity, better change management, and increased innovation.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.