CDP Institute

RudderStack has launched a feature to build unified customer profiles in a Snowflake data warehouse.  The new feature, called, um, Profiles, builds an identity graph and uses it to assemble a customer data table that can include user-defined attributes such as lifetime purchases and last interaction date.  It joins Rudderstack’s existing tools for data collection and distribution to create what’s effectively an integrated CDP.  The main difference from a conventional CDP is the same Snowflake instance could contain non-CDP data.

Snowflake’s annual user conference is under way, so we have a blizzard (sorry not sorry) of announcements from and about them.  I’ll just highlight private previews of a new Large Language Model, based on last year’s Applica acquisition.  It will focus on making unstructured data more usable, and thus encouraging companies to store more of it in Snowflake.

Alliances between ad platforms and retail sales measurement vendors have become so common I may stop writing about them.  They were originally worth noting because they’re one way that marketers adjust to the loss of data from third-party cookies.  Before dropping the veil of silence, I’ll mention that self-serve programmatic ad platform StackAdapt now gives its clients access to retail foot traffic data from Precisely PlaceIQ.

We don’t usually bother to write about companies buying AI vendors, since it happens pretty much every day.  But it’s rare that the buyer is a data tech company like Databricks.  They just bought AI platform MosaicML for $1.3 billion.  Not bad for a two year old company with 76 employees and $37 million in funding.

You don’ t need to be told that AI is a hot topic among marketers, with 92% planning to adopt it and 44% planning to adopt it quickly, according to this Optimizely survey.  What’s interesting is the same survey finds that marketers are doing a terrible job of integrating the tech they already own, with 76% skeptical that their martech will generate the ROI they want. Even more interesting, just 9% of companies with fewer than 20 martech tools doubt they’ll get the expected ROI, compared with 57% of those... Read More >

One of our favorite story lines is that marketers think they’re doing a better job than their customers do.  This SurveyMonkey report makes the familiar point: 86% of CX and digital marketing pros said they consistently deliver a personalized experience but just 8% of consumers agreed.  Here’s a new twist: 63% of pros think AI will improve CX but just 25% of consumers agree.  In fact, 32% of consumers think AI will make CX worse.