Can ad exchange bids provide a useful source of location data? A study from Placed, which captures location data from apps, found that only about 1% of ad exchange bid requests provide out-of-home locations accurate enough to measure in-store traffic. It’s self-serving but nevertheless worth reading for an excellent explanation of the data quality issues.
Amperity, which has been in not-very-quiet stealth mode for over a year, has formally unveiled its “intelligent customer data platform”. As you’d expect, it builds unified customer databases using machine learning and a large-scale distributed data architecture on Microsoft Azure. The big innovation appears to be probabilistic rating of the matches found by its identity resolution engine, so customers take use tighter or looser standards depending on how important it is in a particular situation to be certain that matches are correct. The company raised $9 million in February 2016.
This isn’t exactly news but it’s still interesting to learn that Amazon’s patent on “1-click” ordering expires today. Does it seem they’ve been doing that forever or that they started just yesterday? Bonus question: what will change now that everyone can offer 1-click shopping?
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.