Adobe yesterday announced a unified customer profile that includes data from outside the Adobe Cloud products. Data is mapped using Experience Data Models (an open source data language created by Adobe) and available in real time to any system that speaks that language. This related blog post from Adobe says the unified data is loaded into a persistent Adobe Cloud Platform database on Microsoft Azure and that identities are matched across systems. It supports GDPR requirements too. Impressive and very much in line with the CDP approach.

Hopefully you don’t need convincing that marketers should be honest about how they use customer data. But if you do need a little push, here’s a Harvard Business Review study that found recommendations including an explanation of the data used (“based on your clicks on our site” or “based on what you’ve shared with us”) had higher click and spending rates than recommendations that didn’t describe their basis. Bonus: the paper includes some sound advice for using personal data wisely.

Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation.  The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.