TMW #031 | Google’s cookieless future, Microsoft gets into marketing automation, $10B advertising startup sells for $265M.

Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I try to look to where the industry is going and make sense of it all.

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💭Reflection time: Getting to TMW #030. When you’re building anything, it’s vital to make time to reflect. Reflection takes the past and turns it into a learning asset, which then cultivates good judgment and future value realization. I’m reflecting on publishing 30 newsletters. Here’s a  short deck with updates and some thoughts on the compounding nature of newsletter writing - it took me about half the time to add another 100 subscribers, most of which are CMO/director/senior management level people. Plus some reflections on my focus, updates on starting the podcast and 30 bullet points on what I’ve learned building a global community of marketing technology leaders. Presenation. Tweetstorm.

👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

🎤 New MSoM Episode: Aarron Spinley on explaining experience.

Aarron’s article on the concept of "experience" was in the top three clicked of TMW #026. Why are ill defined words like customer experience confusing the entire marketing industry? Service vs experience strategy layers, customer emotions, engagement as a goal, learning to surf. 🏄‍♂️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, Google. Shownotes & Everywhere else

✍ Commentary

🍪 Google’s cookieless future. Internet advertising is kind of like Frankenstein. Some would say the behemoth of 3rd party tracking has been almost exclusively crafted by Google, a brain child promising riches, but it appears that Google has now realised that they’ve created a monster.

“Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature.

― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Google’s new view on internet privacy was released with a number of announcements. According to Google’s own research 72% of people feel that everything they do online is tracked by advertisers or tech firms, with 81% of those people saying that the risks associated with internet tracking outweigh the benefits, like free social media, search and content access. The big announcement from Google is that, with the sunsetting of 3rd party cookies support in Chrome, Google are not planning to create an alternative identification solution. This is a historic move, which will severely limit targeting capabilities that agencies and brands have grown accustomed to. People in marketing and advertising are famous for their procrastination, and with less than a year left until the true demise of 3rd party tracking, I’m predicting a lot of activity come early 2021 like harnessing first party data and switching to contextual advertising or using Google’s privacy sandbox. Google press release. Analysis from IAB and Mediacom.

📈 Chart of The Week

How did Facebook’s AU news ban affect web traffic levels? Sign up here to get a link to the full version and the chart. You won't be disappointed.

📰 Latest Developments

Xero buys workforce management company Planday. Following similar acquisitions into the operations space like Adobe’s aquisition of Workfront, Xero are looking to enter this market. The idea is that integrating both products will add value by giving business operators the ability to have a clearer understanding of operating costs. Link

Sitecore buys Boxever - The airline CDP. Sitecore is building and expanding. Once a CMS company with an eCommerce offering, but now a contender in the cloud race with Salesforce, Adobe and Episerver, Sitecore wants to own the experience market. Last month they rose a historic $1.2 Billion, to power growth and extend their offering. The Boxever acquisition aims at exactly that, plugging a hole in data collection, enrichments, and activation. Press release. Analysis

📚 Reading

What is a CDP? It seems like these days, every marketing automation platform that dabbles in some web data calls itself a Customer Data Platform. This guide is helpful as it talks through what actually makes a CDP different from a CRM or marketing automation platform. Link

Content-led growth. Outside of relying on social, display, search or affiliate advertising how do tech companies generate demand consistently? Lenny’s newsletter unpacks some of the dynamics of content marketing, SEO factors, using UGC, leveraging network effects like virality and WOMO and editorial content. It also tracks how Hubspot become one of the most prominent CRM brands through consistently publishing. Link

🔢 Data

A study with 400 million people on digital anonymity in India. The Indian government will require companies like TikTok and Facebook to reveal user identities if the government asks them to. The estimates of impacted people are in the hundreds of millions. Link

What’s an NEO? Analysis into customer spending habits in Australia. A NEO (New Economic Order) is a segment of the consumer, roughly 4.7 million people who are responsible for more than 70% of discrepancy spending. Link

💡 Ideas

The ultimate list of GPT-3 Projects. GPT-3 is a new advancement in machine learning capability. UI creators, meme generators, recipe generators, resume builders, advertising content producers is just the tip of the iceberg. Link

Volume - a marketplace for new art projects. Part kickstarter, part art curation, part marketplace. Here’s something cool with a fair bit of potential. Link

✨ Weird and Wonderful

Data science is not a “sexy” job anymore. Earlier in the 2010s data science was hailed as the hottest job in the market. After all the job is in demand, you get to work with cool emerging technologies and get paid fairly well for it. New research suggests that data scientists are spending on average 2 hours per week looking for a new job. Link

Mark Ritson and the 4Ps (again). He got someone to create a slot machine replacing any of the words from the 4Ps with random words that start with “P.” The guy’s certainly got some time on his hands. Link

Make word art like it’s 1999. Link

Stay Curious,

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.