CDP Institute

This report on SaaS company benchmarks from OpenView Partners offers an intriguing snapshot into how businesses are adapting to hard times.  One impressive change is revenue per employee, which has zoomed up to 110% at median companies in different revenue classes and even more at top-performing firms.  Lots more here in product-led growth, acquisition costs, retention and expansion rates, spending and staff categories.

Speaking of product-led growth, Modus Create finds just 23% of companies always involve marketing in customer-facing digital product development, well behind executives (58%) and operations (54%), and even trailing finance (30%) and IT (29%).  You’ll be happier to hear that improved customer experience is the most common benefit expected from digital product projects (47%), trailed by data security (42%), return on tech investments (41%), and highest profitability (38%).

This GP Bullhound report offers ten tech predictions for 2024, officially kicking off the 2024 prediction season.  At least six relate to AI, but they also look at the growth of the private space industry (space as in astronauts, not WeWork), anti-money laundering, and carbon accounting.  Perhaps the riskiest prediction is that Apply will launch an ad-free search engine of its own.   Thought-provoking if not light reading.

Marketing measurement platform AppsFlyer has had a data clean room solution since 2021 and just last month converted it into the Privacy Cloud Marketplace by opening it to third-party services.  The idea is to make it easier for AppsFlyer clients to share data with each other, platforms, partners, ad networks, and everyone else.  They just bought analytics platform devtodev, in good part to serve as a test bed for fleshing out the Privacy Cloud Marketplace services.

Meta and Amazon have quietly teamed up to enable Facebook and Instagram visitors to make Amazon purchases without leaving the social media apps.  Meta has struggled with social shopping, so this is something of an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach.  Both parties also get more precious data tying together customer behavior and purchases.

This Acxiom report finds shoppable advertising is more widespread than you may realize: 45% of brands say they’ve used it with good results and 66% of consumers appreciate the convenience.  The report also provides in-depth discussions of AI-based customer service, loyalty programs, sustainability, and predictive personalization.  While 47% of consumers say they engage more with personalized offers, they strongly prefer that personalization to involve loyalty rewards (56%) than personalized support (35%) or products and services (31%).

You can never tell what’s behind that light at the of tunnel, but let’s think positive.  Firmex, which helps companies to share confidential data during investment negotiations, reports that merger and acquisition advisors are more optimistic about deal volume and valuations than any time since the start of 2022.  Deals are also taking longer to close and include more contingent compensation, but we’ll take any good news we can get.

As if on cue, we have news that programmatic media services provider MiQ is buying Grasp, which offers media governance and data quality technology.  As you surely know, the programmatic buying chain is convoluted, opaque, and other bad things, so Grasp’s ability to reduce errors can only help. MiQ purchased “privacy-first” audience platform (is there any other kind these days?) Air Grid one year ago almost to the day.

Coincidence or not, here’s another acquisition story.  Getir, the “ultrafast” grocery delivery company that promises to deliver orders within 15 minutes, is buying Fresh Direct, which serves the New York regional market.  Don’t get too excited; Fresh Direct services will continue as before.  I think we can chalk this up to consolidation as the crazily-competitive and complex last mile delivery market adapts to post-Covid reality.