🎛️ Beware "Roof Rack" CDPs

The latest contribution from Real Story Group, the technology analyst firm, breaks down the risks of purchasing a CDP as part of a more extensive technology package, rather than investing in an independent CDP: in other words, buying it as a roof rack rather than as the car itself.

CDPs have become popular for good reason: they try to address chronic difficulties marketers have endured around obtaining reliable access to a centralized store of information about customers and prospects. That demand has also lured vendors of adjacent technologies into arguing that their data management subsystems are also CDPs. How’s a buyer to suss out what’s real, and more importantly, what’s ideal?

The Customer Data Platform Institute offers a useful functional definition of a CDP: “A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” For better or worse, this definition allows for a wide scope of potential CDP suppliers.

A core value proposition for CDPs comes from decoupling data services from customer engagement and management systems. Customer channels come and go, but first-party data is gold. Be cautious, therefore, when considering the wide variety of vendors that include some kind of CDP capability as just one part of their offering — from the major marketing suites to CRM and CMS platforms.

Read more here.

While many back-office tools such as ERP and supply chain management have already adopted AI-driven automation, the front office (sales, marketing and service) remains the last bastion of non-automated processes.

Why? Sales and marketing people have dug in on the idea that their roles are more art than science. And they’ve clung jealously to the idea that their intuition and creativity are what differentiate them – which is true, only not in the ways they think.

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A new report from app intelligence vendor Apptopia, customer engagement platform Braze and flight locator Skyscanner shows that consumers still value low costs from travel brands, but are putting health and safety first.

Ready for Takeoff, based on a global survey of 9,500 consumers, plus internal data from the report’s three sponsors, warns that it may take years for leisure travel especially to return to pre-pandemic levels. It does, however, identify three trends that give travel brands a context for engaging with potential clients. In addition to health and safety trumping cost (although cost is still very important), the report found that:

Travel brands should note a high level of interest in factual messaging about COVID-19-related matters, for example, regulations in place at the travel destination (63%), information on the travel brand’s own policies (59%) and news about the state of the virus at the destination (52%).

Why we care. One of the big stories of 2021 will be how fast and successfully business verticals will be able, not only to re-open, but to recover to pre-pandemic levels of performance. Travel and hospitality face stark challenges of course, although there’s a large potential audience of passengers who are yearning for get-aways and have travel budgets they haven’t touched for over a year.

The direction from this survey is clear. It’s not the time for travel brands to pretend the pandemic never happened and send impersonal email blasts letting people know they’re ready for business. They need to take seriously the importance of communicating about COVID-19, their own precautions, and conditions at the destinations they serve. Great deals are always welcome, but for the foreseeable future they’ll need to be packaged with clear, transparent and responsible health and safety information.

The pressure on marketers to justify their expenditures is stronger than ever, in part because technology has made it possible to tie spending to revenues in many cases. MarTech”s”Enterprise Marketing Attribution and Predictive Analytics” examines the market for these tools and the considerations involved in implementation. The 29-page report looks at the market forces impacting marketing attribution and predictive analytics solutions, describes the vendor landscape, examines the feature sets marketers can expect when evaluating such tools, and advises on how to move your decision-making forward.

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Low-code process management and CRM platform Creatio announced a new collaboration with financial information services company Experian. As a result of this relationship, Experian clients will have access to a simplified workflow for processes like debt collections.

An unnamed US debt collection agency is the first company to deploy a system from this joint project, allowing them to automate the collection process without having to build the technology from scratch.

Because of this relationship, Creatio will also have access to Experian’s consulting and use industry best practices for workflow in the financial space.

Why we care. Low-code and no-code solutions like those offered by Creatio are helping to transform marketing. One of the main areas it’s doing this is with automation, as Hubspot VP Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker pointed out at this spring’s MarTech conference. These principles apply to all kinds of workspaces. To make the transition to an industry like finance, an additional partner such as Experian is helpful.

Mark your calendar for next Tuesday and Wednesday, June 15-16, and join us for the premier training experience designed exclusively for expert search marketers. Explore the latest SEO, PPC, and user experience issues with the Search Engine Land editors and industry legends — and learn actionable tactics that give you an edge over the competition.

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Along with paying a $268 million fine, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency as well as improve the way its Ad Manager services works with rival ad servers and sales platforms.

Google will make two main changes to its ad tech: providing more flexibility and transparency for rivals and publishers. “We will work to create a solution that ensures that all buyers that a publisher works with … can receive equal access to data related to outcomes from the Ad Manager auction,” said Gomri. On the flexibility front, Google will now allow partners to “set custom pricing rules for ads that are in sensitive categories and implementing product changes that improve interoperability between Ad Manager and third-party ad servers.”

Why we care. This decision and Google’s response means it will be easier for publishers to use Google’s ad tech tools and learn from the data–which means potentially more options for publishers using ads to drive revenue and fund content.

Read more here.

“Today, I’m listing some key thoughts to keep in mind as we transition back to in-person, or more realistically, a hybrid model.

David Postill, SVP Marketing and CX, AGI