It’s easy for marketers to see marketing as the center of everything. Today let’s look at some other perspectives. We’ll start with this survey of attendees at a recent TechEmergence conference on applied artificial intelligence. Most were business founders and technical employees. When asked about current and future use of AI, they ranked marketingbehind analytics, customer experience, and process automation. It did beat cybersecurity, human resources, finance, robotics, and vehicles.

If you want a trend outside of CDPs, try “data marketplace”. We’ve recently seen them from Sonobi, Kochava, Narrative I/O, and IOTA Foundation. Most aggregate individual-level data from multiple sources to build online advertising audiences. This gives marketers alternatives to the data that Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoard inside their walled gardens. Datonics is another player in the space. They just announced their data will be available in Neustar’s Identity Data Management Platform.

Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.