Here’s a familiar tale: Clevertouch reports that 44% of marketers have at least one platform that goes largely unused but 90% will still make technology their biggest investment in the next year.  The company says “increasing numbers of organizations are deploying ‘simplification solutions’” to shield marketers from complex technology, but doesn’t say how many.

It’s all surveys today, Dear Reader.  First, this Nielsen study finds that marketers rate audience targeting and creative as more important for campaign success than personalization or journey-based messaging.   Most believe that effective targeting requires behaviors as well as contextual data.  Lots more here on channel growth and effectiveness, ROI measurement, marketing objectives, and related topics.

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.