Like other martech outsiders, the big ad holding companies have bought customer data expertise: see Merkle/Dentsu, Acxiom/IPG, and Epsilon/Publicis. WPP’s Wunderman Thompson has plenty of customer data experience – the late Lester Wunderman coined the term “direct marketing” in 1967 – but they still aren’t building their own systems. Instead, they’ve just announced a deal to use Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP within their Customer Cloud platform.
Adobe is creating a new organization to expand its sales to small and mid-size business. The new unit will offer SMB-tailored versions of Magento, Marketo, Adobe Analytics, e-signature, and Creative Cloud. Adobe’s Magento acquisition in 2018 gave it a major foothold in the SMB market.
Winning this week’s Ne Plus Obvious Award (which I just invented), a Princeton University study that found internet-connected TVs track customer data. They found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire channels – and that lots of the data could be linked to specific individuals. Maybe that’s not literally obvious, since the notifications are well hidden, but if you’re surprised then you haven’t been paying attention.
Just over one-third of marketers plan to either buy a new CDP (21%) or replace an existing one (13%) this year, according to this Optimove survey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t report how many have a CDP already in place, which would put the other values in perspective. It does seem that CDPs are a relatively low priority: they rank sixth on the list of new systems and eighth on the list of systems to replace.