CDP Institute

Here’s a retail story that doesn’t involve a media network – but don’t worry, it does feature Amazon, AI, and Kansas City.  Independent retailer Community Groceries will be the first non-Amazon company to deploy the Amazon One entry gate and Amazon’s Just Walk Out checkout technology.  Amazon One grants entry after reading your palm or credit card, while Just Walk Out tracks what customers put in their cart and charges for it.  O brave new world.

The only real question about the retail media network at BJ’s Wholesale Club is why it took so long to get started.  The answer may be they didn’t want to build it for themselves, since they just announced their program will use Microsoft PromoteIQ, a comprehensive retail media platform that Microsoft bought in 2019.  Props to Microsoft for making that deal before retail media networks were cool.

“Retail innovation, design and décor” sounds like an odd combination, although the décor in question has to do with store fixtures, not curtain swags.  In any case,that’s what Retail Fluent does.  They’ve just added retail media networks to the list, including in-store screens, programmatic ad sales, and audience measurement.  And if you do want a drop valance in ruffled muslin, they can probably get you that too.

We have a full pouch of stories about Australian companies but our Emerging Markets editor has threatened bodily harm if I poach them. I can sneak in Aussie-born ecommerce personalization vendor Rokt, because it’s now based in New York. They’ve completed a secondary funding at a valuation of $2.4 billion, one year after a $325 million Series E at $1.95 billion. Not bad in a down year for tech stocks.

Chattermill extracts insights from the text of customer support messages to extract insights.  Naturally, they say they do it better than competitors.  They just raised a $26 million Series B, bringing total funding to $42 million.

Jamie from our Department of the Obvious is delighted with this Forrester study for Neustar, with “key findings” that include “multichannel outbound orchestration is critical to success ”, “customer contact solutions grow customer trust and improve operational efficiency”, and “voice is considered the most important channel for high-value, time-sensitive communications”.   Conventional wisdom is still wisdom, right?

Do you hear that buzz?  Either your office is being attacked by hornets or it’s everyone talking about data clean rooms.  The latest chatter is about VideoAmp, which has integrated its TV audience measurement data with Disney Advertising’s clean room.   The deal will improve audience targeting and measurement across linear and connected TV, which has been a sore point.

Wanna do some audience measurement of your own?  Demandbase is offering a free tool to identify companies visiting your website.  Well, some of them, anyway.  It’s based on IP address, which is pretty standard, but Demandbase adds other tricks to improve the accuracy of its results.

NewsGuard rates news organizations against journalistic standards. They just expanded their reach with report cards for 140 TV shows and networks. NewsGuard shared six sample “nutrition labels”, which show that Tucker Carlson is less reliable than CBS Evening News.  Oh.

Digital transformation is so 2021.  This Salesforce study finds security and privacy have replaced transformation as the top priority of IT managers.  Simplicity is also in style: more plan to consolidate their tech stack (34%) than to add new vendors (11%).  Nearly three-quarters (72%) use no-code/low technology, including 50% of marketing departments.

A recent Marketing AI Institute report lists 41 AI-based writing tools, so I think we can officially say the novelty is gone. But an AI that transforms text into video may still be worth a raised eyebrow. Meet digital publishing tech vendor Ezoic, whose just-launched Flickify does exactly that.

Not every exciting technology succeeds from the start. IBM is shutting down its TradeLens blockchain logistics platform, which was going to revolutionize shipping paperwork. And a Crunchbase review finds that most AI-driven truck companies have run out of gas.