CDP Institute

In fact, companies struggle to measure a lot of things. This survey from Qlik suggests one reason is a lack of basic data literacy skills. Just one-quarter of junior- and mid-level employees classified themselves as data literate while 74% felt their company would value them more if they improved their data literacy level. Encouragingly, 82% said they’d be willing to invest more time and energy in improvement. Click here to rate your own data literacy skills.

Retail personalization specialist Barilliance has added the ability to build a multi-source customer database, including CRM, purchase history, and Web behavior data. The extension is part of a new module, Retention, which also lets users define segments and select offers to deliver via Web personalization, email, Facebook ads, or product recommendations. Whether this qualifies Barilliance as a CDP depends on whether the data is also available to other systems. Apparently not.

You probably don’t need convincing that personalization is helpful but it’s still nice to proof. The Relevancy Group offers some in a report sponsored by email personalization vendor Liveclicker. Analyzing Liveclicker client results, they found that dynamic email content based on behavioral targeting delivered nearly 8% more revenue, real-time personalization based on open time and context delivered a 13% lift, and machine learning personalization increased revenue by 21%. They also report that 55% of consumers said they like emails with relevant products and offers. The rest are masochists.

Whatever kind of system you’re thinking about buying, Nucleus Research has a gift for you: a free copy of their 268-page 2018 Enterprise Technology Buyers Guide. This provides sector overviews and individual vendor assessments for CRM, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Enterprise Content Management, and seven other categories. CDP isn’t included, alas. Separately, and also free, they’ve published ‘State of the Market’ reports on several categories including CRM and Analytics Great stuff. Did I mention free?

Screen6 helps companies link mobile devices to personal profiles. It’s just announced it can update that data in real time, which lets it take advantage of the growing number of cookies (now 40%) that decay within 24 hours, something done to preserve privacy. So much for that.

Speaking of privacy, or lack thereof: Facebook scored what looks like a public relations coup by announcing a new “privacy center” that makes it easier to find and change privacy settings. No mention of changing the policies or options themselves. The new center is apparently required to comply with GDPR.

Here’s an item that’s more related to the previous one than you might think: a study from Salesforce finds that email marketing and display advertising teams collaborate on technology purchases at 74% of U.S. companies today and plan to collaborate at another 20%. The driver behind this lions-with-lambs comity is use of email addresses to feed advertising audiences to, you guessed it, Facebook. Lots of other interesting information here, including usage of data types, technology, metrics, and new ad channels such as voice devices and wearables.

We haven’t seen too many big martech acquisitions recently, but here’s one: GoDaddy is buying Main Street Hub, a company that manages social marketing for small businesses. Price is $125 million, which isn’t much of a return on the $93 million in debt and equity invested in the firm. No one has cracked the code on making money at small business marketing services. But the deal certainly gives GoDaddy something new to offer its customers.

For a broader look at martech investing, check out MarTech Advisor’s just-released Investscape report on 2017. Total funding dropped from $14 billion in 2016 to $8.8 billion in 2017 but the 2016 figures were skewed by a few very large deals. There’s no separate category for Customer Data Platforms in particular or data management in general, but it’s clear that investors’ priorities are on delivery: top funding categories were mobile marketing, e-commerce, sales enablement, loyalty, social media, and events.

If you want a really broad perspective, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a breath-taking drop in trust in U.S. institutions. Among the “informed public”, the combined trust index for government, media, business, and non-government organizations fell from 68 to 45 in the past year, moving the U.S. from one of the world’s most trusting societies to dead last. The broad social implications are horrifying so let’s ignore them to note that marketers can expect privacy and transparency to be more important to their customers.

Adobe has released a connector that lets its Adobe Campaign system read Hadoop data directly. It’s intriguing on more levels than I can discuss here. Let’s just note Adobe’s blog comment that this lets Campaign access raw Hadoop data “without complex data migrations and transformations” as if they weren’t important.

Here’s a milestone of some sort: there’s now a system specifically built to visualize compliance with data privacy rules. That would be Integrity Software, which launched in 2016 and just raised $1.5 million, bringing its total to $4.5 million. GDPR is obviously the big driver here but we can hope that data privacy is being taken more seriously in general.