CDP Institute

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services are expanding their alliance, making it easier for developers to share data, workflows, and services between Salesforce and AWS applications. A separate announcement described new low-code development features for the Salesforce Platform. It also preannounced some new privacy and identity management features, but let’s talk after until they’re actually released.

CDP Amperity also has a new partnership, with the Braze customer engagement platform.  The integration will make Amperity’s unified profiles more easily available to Braze personalization and journey orchestration programs.

Here’s a pair of sibling integrations. Sailthru and Liveclicker, both owned by CM Group, are connecting their systems so Sailthru campaigns can include product recommendations, timers, maps, and other cool Liveclicker features. Meanwhile, Phonexa is offering a suite that combines new click tracking, suppression list management, and cloud PBX products with its previously-separate call tracking, lead distribution, email and SMS marketing, and accounting systems.

I don’t have any real news today, Dear Reader, but can offer a bouquet of fine surveys.  This one by Corinium Global Intelligence for Precisely offers an exceptionally deep dive into business data issues, including differences in data use and prep time by region and industry.   Sadly, just 35% of people report they’d trust a data-driven insight that conflicts with their intuition, and only 13% of companies say most employees can access the data they need for themselves.

This HBR Analytics Services report for Google Cloud tells a similar tale: while 80% of respondents say it’s important to measure the outcomes of their data and analytics investments, just 26% say they’re extremely effective at it.  Leaders are more likely than others to prioritize integration, real time access, machine learning, and open architectures.

Finally, let’s look at organizational insights from a pair of CX surveys. Pointillist finds that high performers are twice as likely as under performers to have a dedicated journey management team, while Wpromote and Ascend2 report that best-in-class B2B digital marketers more often say that teams outside of marketing have a role in improving CX. Also interesting: just 16% of respondents do journey orchestration although 55% do mapping (Pointillist); 42% have no plans to deal with the loss of third-party cookies (Wpromote).

Headless communications may sound like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, but it actually refers to the hot market for systems that provide services through API connections, letting users build their own interface. Nylas has just raised a $120 million Series C for headless communications APIs such as calendars, scheduling, and notification emails.

The virtual event market is another hot space, and no company is hotter than Hopin. The return of live events will probably cool things down a bit, so Hopin just hedged its bets by purchasing on-site event management vendor Boomset.

Tech bashing isn’t exactly a market, but it’s definitely a growth industry. WPP’s GroupM media agency is adding heat with a report that the top 25 media suppliers earn 67% of ad global revenue, up from 42% four years ago for the same companies. The better comparison would be the top 25 suppliers four years ago vs the top 25 today, but there’s no doubt that concentration is up.  Plenty more here on other aspects of the industry.

We’ll say it again: personalization does work.  ROI was over 4x for 71% of retailers who invested in personalized customer experience, according to this Netcore report.  Data gathering is a challenge, with barely half using cross-device and offline data (51%) or real-time behavioral data (49%).  Lots more here of interest.

Much as consumers like personalization, they’re still highly suspicious about data collection. Tinuiti found that 79% think their phone listens to their conversations and makes product recommendations based on what it hears. While 46% say apps track their activity to make their experience better, even more say they do it sell their data to other companies (51%), and a substantial minority say the real purpose is cyberstalking (24%), finding their political views (22%), telling “Big Brother” (18%) and reading their minds (18%). (Speaking of trust, I never received the promised... Read More >

Also speaking of trust, our friends at Facebook have announced plans to inject advertisements into virtual reality experiences on their Oculus mobile app.  What’s entertaining, and a bit pitiful, is that most of the announcement is devoted to explanations of how Facebook will absolutely, sincerely, and completely respect users’ privacy.  Raise your hand if you’re convinced.  (I saw that.)