Blockchain investments are usually too speculative to be worth a mention. But we’ll make an exception for BurstIQ’s $5.5 million Series A because the company has an actual product with a useful application: managing healthcare data to allow both sharing and privacy protection.
Lots of small-but-significant news today, Dear Reader. Oracle has purchased cloud-based loyalty platform CrowdTwist. Industry trends illustrated: marketers focus on full life cycle, not just acquisition; cross-channel orchestration; shift to cloud; expanded scope for enterprise marketing vendors; prebuilt campaigns to speed deployment.
Speaking of customer experience, consultancy COPC found consumer satisfaction with multichannel experience reached the lowest point in the eight years they’ve been keeping score, falling to 38% from 57% in 2018. There’s plenty more in this 75 page report so let’s just pull one factoid: only 60% of respondents said they’d used the phone to resolve a service issue in the past year.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.