The wave of tech industry layoffs rolled closer to CDP-land with news of a 10% reduction in staff at Salesforce. The company blamed over-hiring in anticipation of growth that is no longer anticipated. CDP vendors have largely avoided public layoffs, although we do hear scattered tales of unannounced reductions.
Third-party cookies may be vanishing, but other third-party data is more available than ever. Consumer purchase data compiler IRI reinforced the point with separate deals to (a) provide Meta with brand- and product-level sales data to measure results of Facebook and Instagram ads and (b) offer 1,500 IRI-built individual-level audience segments to TV ad buyers through Experian.
Dentsu-owned Merkle is selling its Response Management Group (RMG), which offers direct response data capture, customer care, and fulfillment, primarily to non-profit and government clients. The 600-person RMG was part of Merkle’s original business, which has now evolved into a 14,000-employee tech-based customer experience agency. Buyer is Moore, a 5,000-person specialist in fund-raising marketing and production.
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.