CDP Institute

This CMO Council report for Sprinklr takes a gloomy position: the headline is 66/% of marketers lack confidence in their ability to meet revenue goals, although that includes 39% who are moderately confident. More cheerfully, 36% are increasing their martech budget for 2023 compared with 25% planning to cut it. Back on the dark side: just 23% say they have a very effective relationship with IT and just 19% strongly agree they can convince their CFO to not cut the marketing budget.

Most marketers (60%) think consumer concerns about tracking technology could hurt their brand reputation and the same fraction agree user tracking will soon be obsolete, according to this global IDC study for Ogury. Despite this, 41% remain moderately or not at all familiar with cookieless alternatives. Ignorance may be bliss: 61% are confident they’ll be able to reach audiences at scale in the future.

While awareness of cookieless alternatives is interesting, the more important question is how many marketers are actually using them. This report by 33Across, which provides cookieless programmatic infrastructure, trumpets news that cooklieless ad CPMs average 21% less than cookie-based CPMs. They are more coy about revenue share, giving industry-by-industry details but no total. My math, which could be wrong, puts the figure about 23% for Q1 2023, maybe up 2% from the quarter before.

Here’s a dog that didn’t bark: Google’s list of 180 countries where its Bard chatbot will now be available doesn’t include any member of the European Union or Canada. Could be they are worried about privacy issues. Maybe people in places with fewer privacy protections should think about that.

You can add Montana to your list of places that care deeply about privacy: they’ve just made it illegal to distribute (but not use) TikTok for exactly that reason. Then again, the just-signed law doesn’t ban any other data-grabbing application. So apparently it’s okay to take Montanans’ data so long as you’re not Chinese.

Data collection is a fundamental building block of customer data management and one of the main bottlenecks. Data integration tool vendor Airbyte has launched a no-code connector builder that it says can reduce the time to build a new connector from several days to under five minutes. It requires a JSON-based HTTP API – and if you don’t know what that is, comrade developer, you probably shouldn’t be using it.

He wasn’t wearing fur handcuffs, but it still seemed slightly kinky when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman begged the government to regulate him during Tuesday’s Senate hearing.  Charmed observers seem to have forgotten that most regulators are quickly captured by the industry they govern, and licensing requirements protect industry leaders from competition.  If you were in Altman’s shoes, you’d ask to be regulated, too.

Customer engagement platform Braze may qualify as a CDP but their focus is message delivery.  They’ve just reinforced that with new features to sync audiences with TickTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest, to simplify consent collection, and to streamline collaboration among marketing teams.  They can also push messages to your iPhone lock screen, which straddles the line between cool and creepy.

Data collection tool Snowflake has launched an attribution modeling solution to measure ad campaign results.  Wait, you say: attribution calculations are complicated and data collection is just the first step.  True enough.  Snowflake’s contribution is to put the data in a suitable format and push it into Snowflake, where the analytical work will take place.