One problem with letting a computer decide which stories are effective is it may not care whether those stories are also true. Come to think of it, that’s a problem with people too. Breaking Data Corp. has an app to help: its technology scans the Web for news events, verifies them, and flags fake news. Or so says their press release.
We saw last Friday that Tylenol is eager to let you know they’re watching your every move. The folks at Acxiom-owned LiveRamp are more discreet even though their ambition is broader: nothing less than a “universal, people-based identifier” to track people across all devices in all media. They’ve just made their IdentityLink IDs available to ad agencies, completing a plan that has already made them available to brands, technology platforms, data owners, and publishers.
And still more about money: companies will spend $4.7 billion on customer journey analytics software and services in 2017, says palindromically-named Markets and Markets. They expect the industry to reach $12.2 billion by 2022. Before you faint at the thought of all that mapping software, read the fine print: the estimate includes all customer segmentation, targeting, behavior analysis, brand management, campaign management and product management systems. Details will cost you $5,650.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)