CDP Institute

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious.  The boss missed work today due to an accident with a Sexy Folding Smartphone costume.  So I get to tell you that this AppsFlyer survey found 86% of consumers are willing to see ads on Connected TV, and they’ll watch three times as many if they’re relevant.  AppsFlyer also reports that advertisers use CTV to reach new audiences, increase engagement, and drive higher lifetime value.  That’s what I call obvious!

Vonage also asked consumers probing questions, and found that they’re more satisfied with communications with family and friends (60%) than with businesses (45%).  They also found that consumers communicate with friends and family the most via messaging apps, but are more likely to use phone calls and email to talk to a business.  That might be obvious to you, but Vonage spoke with nearly 5,000 consumers from eleven countries to be sure.

CoreSite offers the sublimely obvious news that most businesses (82%) expect to use more AI in the next five years.  Almost as obvious: high speed data access is important for AI.  One surprise is the most respondents (40%) cited customer experience as the highest potential AI benefit, just nosing out improved network/IT performance (39%), which leads in most surveys of this type.  Results for current deployments are more typical: CX (30%) and marketing (32%) rank lower than IT and cloud operations (42%), network operations (39%) and customer care (42%).

It’s been said that God created the world in six days because there was no installed base.  Google faces a similar problem, citing fears of ad industry disruption for its repeated delays in the deprecation of third-party cookies.  The issue appeared in another guise this week when Google announced it would extend to July 2024 the life of UA360, the enterprise version of its Universal Analytics product, which is otherwise still scheduled to go away in October 2023.  See this AdExchanger article for background.

Apple is another company whose twitches can make shatter a market.  It flexed its muscles this week with new App Store rules that force sellers to let it collect a commission on payments to boost social media posts and to sell Non-Fungible Tokens.  Here’s TechCrunch’s take on what it all means.

Remember the U.S. Government?  They’re not entirely powerless, although it sometimes feels that way.  The Federal Trade Commission made its own point this week with a proposed settlement that will hold Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas accountable for security failures that resulted in a 2020 data breach exposing personal information on 2.5 million customers.

Amazon is upping its adtech game with enhancements to its Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) clean room, audience management, and results measurement. They’ve also set up an AMC integration with Treasure Data for audience definition and analytics — the first for a CDP — and another with data clean room vendor Habu.

No one needs reminding that cybersecurity is a problem , although consumers are still distressingly lax in protecting themselves. The U.S. government is trying to help by publishing security ratings for IoT devices,  which offer especially juicy targets. Private companies are also making progress with replacing passwords for corporate systems and Paypal just enabled passwordless access using Apple facial and touch recognition.

Unauthorized data sharing is a challenge, but so is sharing data on purpose.  Unito eases data sharing between Software-as-a-Service systems with two-way synchronization technology.  They claim more than 50,000 users and just raised a $20 million Series B, bringing total funding to $33 million

“Composable CDP” means different things depending on what the speaker is trying to sell. Case in point: self-proclaimed “composable CDP” Lytics just released Conductor, a single component that includes data connection and unification services which others might sell separately.  Lytics has only two other components: Cloud Connect, a reverse ETL solution, and Decision Engine, which does data activation and personalization.

One of the fascinating things about the CRM industry is that hundreds of systems survive even though they do roughly the same things.  The trick is finding a niche.  WATI has chosen a huge one: businesses reaching the two-billion-plus global WhatsApp users.  They just raised a $23 million Series B, bringing total funding to $31 million.

Google has responded to consumer requests for greater privacy by (wait for it) asking them to give up more data about what they consider private.  More precisely, they’ve expanded My Ad Center to let users define in more detail the kinds of ads they do and don’t want to see.  Responsible, diabolical, or a bit of both?