Should marketers be in charge of customer data? A study by Econsultancy for SAP suggests the answer is yes: companies doing the best job with their customer data are vastly more likely than others to say marketing owns the customer (66% vs 11%) and manages customer data operations (44% vs 25%). Leaders are better at lots of other things, too. Well worth a look.
IBM is buying open source technology vendor Red Hat in a deal valued around $34 billion. IBM’s announcement crows this “changes everything about the cloud market”. But it also says Red Hat will operate as a separate unit, so it’s not clear how. Probably more relevant: Red Hat is growing and IBM is not.
Lest you conclude the good guys have won, we have the 132-page IAPP-EY Annual Privacy Governance Report on what’s actually happening. Which is that 56% of companies still haven’t complied with GDPR and 19% say they don’t expect to, ever. Just 32% consider their privacy program mature and a minuscule 2% have fully automated response to data subject requests – a GDPR right that would quickly overwhelm manual processes if it widely exercised.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.