Nearly two-thirds (61%) of marketing software buyers have regretted a software purchase in the past twelve to eighteen months, according to this Capterra survey. Clear goals and stakeholder alignment are seen as the best way to avoid problems. Regret or not, marketing software is the second highest priority investment across all categories (28%), second only to IT security (32%).

It’s safe to say that a lack of software isn’t holding marketers back.  Dentsu reports that finding the right data is CMO’s biggest external challenge (38%), followed by understanding changes in consumer behaviors (35%).  Keeping up with emerging new tech (33%) and dealing with the fragmented tech landscape (30%) headed the list of media transformation challenges.

Retail and hospitality customer engagement platform Givex has added the ability to create comprehensive customer profiles that include interaction data from other systems.  The new product, GivexEngageAI, also develops customer segments, executes marketing campaigns, and recommends next best actions.  The company refers to it as a CDP and it does appear to tick all of our boxes.