CDP Institute

Continuing in our glass half empty/half full mode, Adobe found mixed reports from workers stuck at home: 32% said they were more productive and 23% said they were less productive than they were in the office. The remaining 45% saw no difference. The most missed features of office life were team collaboration and informal chats with co-workers. Bosses may be sad to learn the least missed was direct access to their supervisor.

A cynic would argue that Facebook has limited some groups fostering QAnon conspiracy theories because QAnon’s extreme craziness alienates slightly-less-crazy voters inclined to support Republicans. A true cynic would say they did it to give the rightists something to rally against, while noting Facebook’s actions are far from a complete ban. Either way, before you cheer Facebook’s sudden lurch towards responsibility, remember they have fostered hate groups for years and bent their rules to favor rightist misinformation.

In more cheerful news, AudienceProject reports that self-reported use of ad blockers has dropped from 52% of U.S. respondents in 2016 to 41% in 2020. They also note that data based on actual sessions, as opposed to user surveys, shows no more than 20% of sessions are in fact blocked. Lots of interesting details including results from other countries, the impact of ads appearing near offensive content, and changes in annoyance about ads in general.

If you’ve been wondering how much mobile device usage grew during the pandemic, App Annie has some answers: mobile hours were up 25% compared with the second half of 2019 and ad placements in June 2020 were 70% higher than June 2019. PubMatic’s quarterly mobile ad report found similar growth and a surge in ads bought through private marketplaces: these are expected to account for 51% of programmatic mobile ad spending, exceeding the volume on open exchanges. Private marketplaces offer less risk of inappropriate placements than open exchanges.

Today’s theme, for no particular reason, is Data Professionals Behaving Badly. First we have news that 48% of IT organizations regularly release applications they know contain security flaws. See this blog post for a full-scale rant on the topic, quoting a half-dozen different surveys.

Next, let’s train our sights on Chief Data Officers. Two thirds (65%) told Informatica that data privacy and protection are a top performance metric, yet 53% don’t use privacy and protection tools and 40% don’t even track risk metrics. Bear in mind these are the same data people who have “you manage what you measure” tattoos in places you don’t usually see.

Finally, SnapLogic reports IT leaders say the average company has connected just 49% of its 115 data sources. This isn’t entirely for lack of trying but it still means the average employee loses 4 hours per week resolving data issues and that 42% of processes which could be automated are still done manually. Biggest obstacles are legacy technology, complex data types, data siloes, and regulatory requirements.

I’m intrigued by this report that citizen cybercriminals can purchase DDoS attacks as a service. But it’s not worth a news item. So instead let’s note that survey data compiler Dynata has integrated its 62 million personal profiles with Google’s Ads Data Hub. ADH, as it’s known to friends, is a sandbox that lets YouTube advertisers analyze their results without seeing any personal data.

How’s your Dutch? Mine is non-existent, but Google Translate confirms that The Data Agency, a recently-formed combination of four Dutch data-driven marketing firms, has purchased CDP vendor Invicta. Two other components of The Data Agency, EDM and LinqID, also offer something like a CDP. Apparently the Dutch grow these like tulips.

Back on more familiar turf, Informatica has purchased GreenBay Technologies, which offers AI-based entity matching, schema matching, and metadata graphs. The tech will strengthen Informatica’s capabilities for “self-integrating systems”. Who needs citizen integrators when robots can do the job instead?

Let’s just do some straightforward martech news today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with email delivery vendor Validity, which has been on an acquisition binge. They just launched a new platform, Everest, that ties together features from several of their purchases. The company modestly says it will “give marketers everything they need to ensure email success” although it doesn’t include frills like lists, content, or products.

Cross-channel content platform Movable Ink has mostly grown its product through internal development, but it’s now thinking that acquisitions might be a good next step. The company just raised a $30 million Series C, bringing its total to $39 million, to help make that possible.