Ah, a normal news day at last. We have an acquisition: Web delivery platform Akamai has purchased customer identity access management vendor Janrain. It’s not a pairing you might have expected but it does make sense: Akamai adds security to Janrain’s log-in processes. Quite relevant to marketers who want better ways to build trust and capture customer identities.
Back to surveys. At least this one from email company Yes Marketing is interesting. Turns out that irrelevant product recommendations are the second-most-common reason for not opening email (50%), after too many emails (55%). Over-personalization “creeps me out” (12%) outweighs lack of personalization (11%). In other words, consumer demand personalization is greatly exaggerated – and poor personalization is hurts more than no personalization at all.
The Customer Data Platform industry continued its strong growth in 2018, adding 29 vendors, 2,600 employees, and $173 million in funding. These figures, contained in the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update, show acceleration compared with 2017, when the industry added 26 firms and 2,200 employees.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.