CDP Institute

Call it karmic balance: companies struggling to identify anonymous customers must also strain to verify that people who do identify themselves are really who they claim.  The reason, of course, is there are more fraud possibilities as online business expands.  One example of the growing identity authentication industry: Mastercard just bought anti-fraud identity specialist Ekata for a cool $850 million.

On the same lines, digital commerce protection platform Signifyd just raised a $205 million Series E.  Signifyd doubled its revenue last year and expects to reach a $200 million run rate by 2022.  The company has an identity graph that can be used to improve customer experience as well as reduce fraud.

This Experian report finds that security is also a high concern for consumers, with 55% saying it’s the most important aspect of their online experience.    Businesses agree, rating fraud detection as their second-highest digital CX priority, well ahead of decisioning software, staff, and fixing legacy technology.  Intriguingly, consumers said they prefer biometrics, PIN codes, and behavioral analytics over passwords.  Interesting breakouts by region and age.

Marketers are spending lots of time looking for ways to track people without third party cookies and device IDs.  Let’s look at methods that don’t require tracking.  We’ll start with adtech vendor Swaarm, whose just-introduced “PEA Chain” offers accurate revenue attribution without Apple’s IDFA device ID.  The trick is that each ad click generates a token that captures all previous traffic sources and campaigns, eliminating the need to stitch the chain together using the IDFA as the connector.

Ladorian delivers messages to point-of-sale devices, using AI to tailor each message based on everything from inventory to weather to shopper behavior patterns (but not individual profiles). They’ve just added inputs from inReality, which uses in-store cameras to classify the mood, age, gender, and behavior of individual shoppers at specific locations (without identifying them).  Is anonymous surveillance an oxymoron?

PriceSpider spans online and offline channels, using QR codes to turn anything with a physical or virtual surface into a potential point of purchase.  Decide for yourself whether that’s a dream come true or nightmare.

Marketers rate personalized experiences below better customer experience, better onboarding, more offering awareness, and even more flexible payment terms in their plans to increase loyalty, according to this Persado survey.    Very interesting, although the real focus of the survey was the use of artificial intelligence in marketing.  In a nutshell: it’s growing, profitable, and increasingly used to create content.  Download for details.

Verizon Media’s new Next-Gen Solutions use AI to help replace cookies, by applying machine learning to predict behavior of anonymous users based on real-time data such as location, device type and weather.  Verizon Media has a separate product, ConnectID, to target ads when a company does know user identity.

Why settle for replacing third party data with second- or first-party data when you can take it all the way to zero, asked no one ever.  But that hasn’t stopped Wyng from touting its zero-party data solutions, which get customers to intentionally share their data through quizzes, surveys, product finders, and such.  The company has just added two new components: a portal to let customers directly update their information and a zero-party-data-based recommendation engine.

We’re all about integration today, Dear Reader.  First: Merkle has integrated its Merkury identity resolution platform with Adobe Experience Platform, which includes Adobe’s Real Time CDP.  Adobe clients will be able to connect more identifiers and enhance customer profiles with Merkle data.

Next: Reltio, a cloud-based master data management system that we sometimes classify as a CDP, has made its multi-domain Enterprise 360 service available in Google Cloud Marketplace.  The company plans to add its Identity 360 and Connected Customer 360 services to the marketplace “in coming months”.   It keeps getting easier to find CDP building blocks on the cloud platforms.

Finally: customer data sharing platform InfoSum is adding Experian audience data to its pool of available sources.  InfoSum lets different companies combine their data into audiences without revealing individual identities.  The Experian data will create richer audience profiles.