CDP Institute

IBM’s The Weather Company is joining with Nielsen to offer Zip code-level advertising triggers based on local weather and Nielsen’s product sales data. The magic of artificial intelligence has let IBM develop more than 500 triggers with up to six variables per trigger. These will be available to target ads across programmatic, display, social, search, video, email, and digital out of home media.

Predictive analytics vendor RevTrax is expanding beyond offer recommendations to add a half-dozen models for personalization choices. The new offering, Predictive Purchase Data, analyzes Web site visitor behavior in real time, predicting price sensitivity, retailer preferences, and best time to engage. Models are based on past behavior but the system doesn’t seem to track individual customers over time.

Here’s a frightening tidbit: 35% of U.S. consumers told The Harris Poll that they would be happy if they never made an in-store retail purchase again. Seventy percent said they prefer zero human contact during shopping experiences. Presumably preferences will evolve after the pandemic ends but you do have to wonder how deep these scars will be.

There’s so much we need to discuss, Dear Reader, that today I’ll jam in more items than usual. We’ll start slowly: project management software vendor Atlassian is launching a $50 million venture fund to support companies that connect to its platforms. Owning an ecosystem clearly is in fashion.

Ignoring data is another trend, and it's not just for politicians.

Speaking of politicians, let’s catch up with Big Tech Goes to Washington. In the politically-tinged TikTok soap opera, several players are having second thoughts about the ill-defined Oracle deal. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is eyeing anti-trust action against Facebook and the Justice Department and Republican state attorney generals are rattling anti-trust swords at Google.  Outside the Beltway, Google faces a $3 billion lawsuit in the United Kingdom over children’s privacy at YouTube.

CDP Amperity launched its third-generation product, which it calls “the first comprehensive enterprise CDP”. Competitors will likely disagree. Labels aside, the system does offer new features for data management, identity resolution, segmentation, predictive models, performance measurement, and more.

Down at the simpler end of the spectrum, this report from Litmus finds that email remains a workhorse channel for most marketers, and in fact has become even more important since last year. The really good news is that users have become more sophisticated, with the more now doing tests and personalizing on advanced data including past interactions (up from 27% to 40%) and purchases (from 38% to 60%).

Here are two studies that agree the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation but disagree on how. A Forrester study for MediaMonks found that marketers have become more innovative: their new top priority is accelerating digital experience initiatives (61%) and their next phase of digital transformation will focus on virtual experiences (72%). Meanwhile, Spiceworks Ziff Davis found that IT managers have pulled back investments in advanced technology to focus on immediate needs including security, cloud migrations, and remote worker support. Could be a marketer vs IT thing.

No-code app builder Airtable has raised a $185 million Series D, bringing its total to $355 million. The company also announced more automation and data management features plus “low-code” custom apps that require writing JavaScript. Make of that what you will.

Marketing operations teams are likely users of self-built solutions to make their jobs easier. This Gartner survey about marketing ops honestly doesn’t say much of interest but, hey, it’s from Gartner so you’ll probably want to take a look.

Experience analytics platform Medallia is paying $44 million to buy Sense360, which gathers and analyzes consumer location, transaction, and survey data. The company calls the deal a “game changer”, which may be stretching it. But a bit more consumer behavior did just come into sharper focus. Make of that what you will, too.