If marketing spend does fall, one perpetual explanation is lack of measurability. Feel free to add this Cision study to the evidence: they found that 73% of U.S. communications professionals (i.e., public relations staff) “do not have a good sense of whether or not there was any digital or real-world behavior driven from the brand’s content” Interesting implication that “digital” isn’t part of the “real world”.
Among my many pet peeves are vendor claims to have the first or only product in a market. Today’s news items are important even though they’re not as unique as promised. We’ll start with Panoply, which has just released its “smart cloud data warehouse” from beta. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically enrich, transform, and optimize complex data. That’s really important, since those tasks are major obstacles to customer data unification. So important, in fact, that we also wrote last week about Qubole’s similar-sounding product.
Finally, here’s a report from Demandbase and Wakefield Research on agency adoption of ABM.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.