CDP Institute

With all these crazy changes happening, not to mention a pandemic, this seems like the right time to mention that Dentsu has found “prepared” CMOs are more likely to succeed. Agility, customer experience innovation, and expanding beyond marketing’s traditional role all distinguish this group. They’re twice as likely to expand their budget in the next year as “non-prepared” CMOs. Download to see what else they’re doing differently.

Dun & Bradstreet has launched a self-service data quality tool, D&B Connect. It cleans, matches, and enriches data within existing systems rather than pulling it into a separate CDP. They don’t call it “no-code master data management” but it must have been tempting.

Phunware gets style points for a friendly name but loses them immediately by calling itself a “fully-integrated enterprise cloud platform for mobile”, which tells you exactly nothing. Near as I can tell, they offer some combination of analytics, messaging, and ad sales. In any case, they’ve just added a CDP to the mix, pulling in data from many sources and organizing it for customer analytics and segmentation. Don’t get me started on “Multiscreen-as-a-Service”.

Amplitude calls itself a “product intelligence platform”, which seems to mean it’s selling customer behavior analytics to product managers. They’ve just introduced a customer journey analysis tool that tracks customer behavior on digital products and finds the events with the highest impact on results like dropping out or converting. Useful.

Google Analytics is adding AI-based trend discovery and recommendations, cross-channel conversion measurement, and integration with Google advertising products. It’s “privacy-centric by design” in not using cookies or device IDs, although it does leverage the vast personal data stores that Google gathers without sharing. No reason to worry that Google results will favor Google properties. No reason at all.

Even as Google adds services that were once sold by independent vendors, this Merkle study finds that 67% of marketers would rather combine best-of-breed systems than use one vendor’s integrated suite. Then again, 79% would prefer to build their own software than buy it from anyone. Lots more here about martech satisfaction, real-time, and other important topics.

Rreports of personalization’s death are greatly exaggerated. This exquisitely designed study from MAGNA and IPG Media Lab found different kinds of video ad personalization generated improvements from 5% to 16% in different metrics. Fascinating detail on how subject matter, data type, ad channel, and other variables affect results.

SAP has launched its long-awaited Customer Data Platform, based on identity and data management technology it acquired with Gigya in 2017. Key differentiators include integrated privacy management and connections to systems outside of marketing. General availability is set for end of November.

Informatica doesn’t have a single product labeled as a CDP but it does offer all the pieces to assemble one. They’ve just announced a slew of new features across their products, including richer views into customer behaviors, AI-powered data cataloging, and data marketplace to make enterprise data more accessible. There are a couple of nods to self-service and data democratization, but we’re clearly in yes-code territory.

The California Attorney General has proposed changes to CCPA regulations that explicitly ban practices intended to make opt-outs harder, including double-negative language, processes that take more clicks to opt-out than to opt-in, or burying the submit button within the text of a privacy policy. No prizes for guessing why they felt that was necessary.