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.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”