TMW #008 | Facebook and Australian news. Salesforce migrating to Microsoft and Apple ending in app tracking
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.
Here's everything you've missed in marketing and technology this week 👇
😛 Cheeky Plug
I have been part of a working group developing an experimentation industry maturity survey. The purpose is to help companies better understand where their experimentation/optimisation program sits within the industry. It's a bit of a labor of love, but also pretty cool - you get a customized set of recommendations and a maturity score for free. Link
👌Top #3
📰 The media bargain saga continues - Facebook threatens to shut down Australian news. After Google protested Australia's media bargaining code legislation on its homepage, Facebook has now jumped into the ring, threatening not to allow news publishers to have their links published on the Facebook platform. This is quite a historic move for the social media giant, with parallels of this kind of backlash comparable to what's happening in Spain and Europe. No doubt this highlights the severity and somewhat absurdity of the government's demands on big tech. About 24% of Australians name ‘going direct’ their main way of accessing news online, especially the older generation and affluent, yet among younger populations, 26% of Australians consume news through social media. To give you a sense of the scale of Facebook's influence over the news, the social media company reports that $2.3 billion clicks were sent to news publishers over the first 5 months of 2020. And while DAUs are coming from non-news aggregation platforms (TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp), this suggests that Facebook has more control over what news media outlets can and can't do on their platform. To be fair, the Australian government's approach to this kind of regulation is not realistic, for example, asking for tech companies to notify news publishers of algorithm changes 28 days in advance will severely limit other things like moderating fake news and violence quickly. No doubt regulation is heading to big tech companies in Australia, this is just the first speed bump. Link
🤝Salesforce is migrating to Microsoft. In an interesting turn of events, Salesforce have partnered with Microsoft's Azure infrastructure for its marketing cloud products to form a joint partnership for both products. It's a fairly big deal and a little mind-boggling. Growth has been good for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud reporting US$616 million last quarter, which may indicate that competitive forces (like Microsoft's Dynamics 365) may be less of a consideration for Salesforce than previously thought. It looks to me like a classic case of "coopetition" both parties can benefit more together than apart, given that the majority of sales professionals out there are using Microsoft teams and Office products with Salesforce, and the integration into Azure opens up opportunities to integrate the into Teams infrastructure with Salesforce CRM and marketing cloud tools. This will just be the start, expect to see more integration offerings between Microsoft and Salesforce services as these two companies go multi-cloud. Link
⚔ Apple is killing the IDFA (identifier for advertisers). This is rolling in with iOS updates, but in short, what it means is that advertisers will have a harder time stitching together identities within iOS apps to offer relevant and contextual offerings within iOS apps. The iOS app revenue market is estimated to be worth about $80 billion, of which a significant chunk will be impacted by the changes. Google is following suit with an android version to block advertising tracking also. This will make the monetization of free apps harder and harder for developers while also limits the ability to target users within apps as well. This also falls into line with Apple ITP blocking safari and disabling 3rd party cookies. The web issue can be solved mostly through 1st party cookie solutions and there's some interesting work happening in this space, but when it comes to the locked ecosystem of the app store, there will be fewer workarounds for advertisers. This also means poorer quality advertising. Personally I deleted my Apple News app because every single ad served to me was highly irrelevant and research does show that consumers prefer relevant and personalized advertising. All of this is heading into a privacy war with companies like Apple drawing a line in the sand and declaring privacy for consumers should be a higher priority for advertisers than monetization. Link
📈Chart Of The Week
Some interesting research has recently come out of Ascend2 (a marketing research firm based in the US) about how companies use customer journey mapping techniques to plan for marketing, sales customer service, and product strategies. What's striking here is that product teams rank the lowest in the involvement of creating a customer journey map. This is interesting because the product (digital) and marketing teams have often lived in separate business units, and while these teams are coming together more to solve their customer's problems there's really still a large gap in customer journey planning involvement. If you've ever created a lifecycle map before it can quickly become a complex endeavor, especially when involving sales and customer service. There is an understanding among many companies that when not done correctly the customer journey lives as a PDF in a long-forgotten folder, but when it's done right it should become the coordinating strategy guiding both how to use insights derived from data but also what each step of the journey requires to solve your customer's needs. I'm hoping that in the industry more product people join in on customer journey mapping workshops. Link
📚 Everything Else
Optimizely has been acquired by Episerver, big news which kinda makes sense. Link
Sendgrid has been hacked, a lot of customers have had their user names and passwords sent to spammers. Link
How Dominos is using AI to predict consumer pizza consumption three weeks into the future. AWS is heavily involved in the project. Link
Apple is disrupting financial services by leveraging landing page tactics for it's Apple Card product. Link
Illion in partnership with AlphaBeta has put together a fairly comprehensive report on the impacts of COVID-19 on consumer spending. Link
How the hotel business use tag management to drive sales. Link
Google expands Kormo in India, it's a job search app and it has about 24 million daily active users. Link
Brands are now using empty stadium seats for promotion. God help us. Link
How one of Australia's most beloved ads were made. Gorilla vibes. Link
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.
