CDP Institute

Someone at Salesforce has taken the “every company is a publisher” cliché a bit too literally, resulting in Salesforce+, a new content streaming service that promises endless hours of Salesforce-related materials.  There will be no fewer than four channels featuring a slate of live experiences, on-demand videos, and – everyone’s favorite – the best of Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce keynotes.  Watch for plush costumes.

In slightly less bizarre broadcast news, media quality service Integral Ad Science has purchased connected TV ad platform Publica.  It sounds like a referee becoming a player, but IAS apparently sees it as improving the game for everyone.  Price was $220 million including 75% cash and 25% stock.

Contextual ad analytics expert GumGum has also jumped closer to the publisher side by buying JustPremium, one of the largest rich media and video ad marketplaces in Europe.  The deal will give GumGum more places to insert its contextually-targeted ad units.  Price wasn’t announced.

In case you still question whether marketing ops is Officially A Thing, this Brandmaker report finds 70% of senior marketers say their company has a dedicated marketing ops team and 73% say that team is responsible for both martech and tracking campaign performance.  The most-desired improvement was better integration of the tech stack, but, oddly, integration ranked fifth as an investment priority.  Download for lots more.

Shaped By’s survey of tech marketers also highlighted the role of tech: half the respondents said marketing is dominated by technology while about one-quarter said it was dominated by creativity.  (The rest said they’re about equal.)   Interestingly, small businesses put tech dominance much higher (61%) while enterprise marketers split evenly on tech vs creativity (37% each).  I’d guess that small businesses struggle more with tech because they have fewer resources, but maybe there’s something else going on.

Things look a bit different from the IT perspective. ServiceNow consultants Acorio found that companies are more focused on internal efficiency than customer satisfaction: for example, 76% track time to resolve an incident as a Key Performance Indicator while just 19% track customer satisfaction. Similarly, GenPact reports that CIOs are prioritizing projects such as artificial intelligence and cloud migrations, with customer experience tech ranked sixth on the list. One welcome bit of realism: just 22% of CIOs thought they were the primary drivers of digital transformation, while 61% recognized they... Read More >