CDP Institute

The loss of third-party cookies has generated more news than the loss of Amelia Earhart.

COVID-19 gets more attention than third-party cookies, Amelia Earhart, and Bigfoot combined. It’s no surprise that this Acquia report finds marketer and consumer behaviors changed due to the pandemic.  But did you know that 82% of marketers reported their ROI on marketing technology improved during the period? More than half (54%) invested in CDPs, ranking just behind marketing automation (63%) and well ahead of AI and machine learning (44%), personalization (43%), and content management (35%).

It’s no longer news that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, but it’s still interesting to see just how much. AppDirect found 69% of B2B marketers had accelerated digital plans or launched new projects, while 89% of CIOs told Dynatrace that digital transformation has sped up.

Precisely has launched a new data integrity suite, with APIs for data cleaning, profiling, matching, geocoding, and enrichment. It runs on-premises, in the cloud, or across both. Martech trivia note: Precisely changed its name from Syncsort in May and acquired the data management systems from Pitney Bowes last December.

Mobile attribution vendor AppsFlyer has introduced Incrementality, a solution that runs tests to determine the incremental impact of remarketing programs. Managing hold-out samples is tough, so that’s noteworthy in itself. But I was also intrigued by AppsFlyer’s statement that “attribution and incrementality are completely independent concepts” – the difference, apparently, being that attribution assigns full or fractional revenue “credit” to marketing touches while incrementality estimates the net revenue change resulting from a touch. Got that?

Second party data is shared by the company that collected it, while third party data is shared by aggregators who get it from the companies that collected it. Neustar’s new “Second Party Data Marketplace” blurs the distinction by offering consumer profiles from Neustar, ad exposures from iSpot.tv, mobile shopping data from Scanbuy, and geo-location data from Foursquare. It’s all connected with Neustar’s own identity graph.

Google has announced it will no longer allow marketers to target ads for housing, employment, or credit products based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or Zip Code. The change is aimed at blocking discrimination against disadvantaged groups. Coincidentally or not, it comes just as the Justice Department unveiled its long-expected anti-trust suit against the company.

In another burst of social responsibility, ad industry groups have launched a new program to stop the spread of hate on social media. The program, #EngageResponsibly, includes technology for consumers to report hate speech and a database to track hate groups across platforms. Intriguingly, it also lets advertisers calculate the amount of hate speech they are unintentionally supporting and make offsetting contributions to anti-hate groups.

Artificial intelligence raises social issues of its own. In this NTT DATA Services survey, one quarter of executives said their AI system had tried to gain access to restricted data, worked on an unauthorized project, ignored a command, or suggested taking illegal measures for efficiency. There’s also data on AI adoption rates, attitudes towards AI, data strategies, employee retention, change management, and other interesting topics.

International Sloth Day, the traditional day for CDP product announcements, was yesterday, but being late is appropriately sloth-like.  So we won’t criticize Acquia for announcing prebuilt machine learning models (slothily effortless) and real-time updates to customer profiles (not very slothish but marketers may approve anyway).

Progress is a low-effort application development platform, not a CDP, but they did announce new data connectors for near-real-time access to martech platforms including HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle Eloqua. Reducing effort fits the Sloth Day spirit, although building a home-grown CDP with a tool like Progress is more work than any self-respecting sloth would undertake.

That’s it for product news. We do have a study from data integrity vendor Precisely, which found that 66% of customer experience leaders believe building a 360-degree customer view will be essential in the post-COVID-19 world and 60% have become more interested in data integration technologies because of the pandemic. Less surprising: 86% have changed the CX strategy, 79% see more digital interactions, and 50% says customer now expect more seamless, integrated digital experiences.