CDP Institute

Let’s catch up with some product news today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with Braze, which has released Braze for Commerce, a package of personalization tools for retail and ecommerce merchants.  The one new product in the bundle, Braze Catalog, lets marketers use product data within personalized messages.  Other components include surveys, SMS click tracking, advanced segmentation, and data sharing across Braze’s email, SMS, mobile, and web tools, and paid social channels.

Comcast-owned Freewheel has just launched a service that lets media buyers purchase audiences that are deduplicated across linear TV (the old-school channels you see on cable) and Connected TV (the things you access through streaming content services).  The service uses linear TV audiences in Comcast households as a base, and supplements it with ads on CTV services that have partnered with Comcast. It’s one small step to make CTV buying easier.

Grocery retailer Kroger continues to flesh out its retail media business.  Just added: an option to use the Pacvue, Skai, and Flywheel Digital ad management platforms to purchase product listing ads on Kroger ecommerce sites.  Before you ask: Flywheel Digital is unrelated to Comcast Flywheel.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious.  The entire staff was trapped last night when someone forgot the key at an Escape the Room event, so I’m writing today’s newsletter.   First, this survey from The Harris Poll for NetReputation.com found 76% of consumers won’t buy products with a “one-star or less” online rating.  What’s not obvious is why the other 24% would.

Next, we have an academic study with the obvious finding that Facebook’s interest category targeting is often wrong. Among other things, Facebook doesn’t differentiate positive from negative sentiment when inferring interest. Speaking of Facebook, there are reports that they paid a right-wing lobbying agency to plant negative stories about TikTok. Not exactly obvious, but not surprising, either.

Finally, Thales Group offers a study with the delightfully obvious conclusions that companies do a poor job of protecting sensitive data and that remote work makes things even worse.  The problem is certainly obvious to corporate leaders: 28% said they wouldn’t trust their own personal data to their organization.  Hey, they may be inept but they’re not stupid.

This Ascend2 survey for Oracle has lots of interesting information, but also some puzzles.  For example: CDPs rank first on the list of planned martech investments (37%) but data silos data and poor integration fall last on the list of challenges.  Or consider this:  82% say they want to change some stack components to improve performance while 88% say they already have access to appropriate data for marketing decisions.

Data connectivity vendor Kong surveyed tech staff, not marketers. That group ranked poor integration, in the form of multiple technologies, as the top obstacle to innovation. In fact, even though 75% fear competitive failure if they don’t innovate, the group rated security, performance, and reliability as more important than innovating quickly. On the other hand, they’re all-in on microservices, with more than half running at least 50 and 86% seeing them as “the future”.

Kustomer spoke with CX professionals, who predictably believe that customer service will become more important in the next three years. They sided with IT in citing scattered data as their organizations’ biggest weakness, with insufficiently personalized experience ranked second. But when it came to actual priorities, reducing wait times was number one at 81%, while increased personalization finished fifth at 66%.