Decisions, decisions. Should we talk today about artificial intelligence or visual marketing? We can do both this item about Adhark, whose Ava platform uses AI to score the “visual resonance” of images, based on its understanding of the visual preferences of marketing audiences. This apparently represents a pivot for Adhark, which last year introduced a now-vanished product to recommend social media activities.

Not every retailer has the resources to design targeted marketing campaigns. Womply is there to help with an email marketing engine that automatically sends welcome, winback, loyalty, and survey campaigns. Womply captures credit card transactions to build a customer database, which it then leverages for analytics and marketing. It also provides small retailers with other online marketing services including directory listings, advertising, and reputation management.

With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).