CDP Institute

Like trouble, bad behavior by Meta shows up whether you look for it or not.  The latest is an open-source language model that was supposed to provide reliable search results because it was trained on academic papers.  Alas, it was quickly withdrawn after reviewers found that it returned results that were grammatical and plausible but also incorrect, not to mention filled with “antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny.”  How can this be a surprise?

Amazon is no model citizen (see its history of union busting and employee injuries) but they at least try to look responsible. The latest effort is a virtual health care service called Amazon Clinic, which will “message-based virtual care” for more than 20 non-emergency health conditions such as allergies, acne and hair loss. It will complement, and perhaps help to gain approval for, Amazon’s proposed purchase of primary care providing One Medical.

We’re headed into the Thanksgiving holiday so let’s end on a positive note.  The press release for this Veracode report is headlined “73 Percent of Retail Applications Contain Security Flaws, but Only a Quarter Are Fixed” which is the type of clickbait that headline writers love.  But the report actually finds that security practices have improved in recent years.  It also finds much greater use of microservices architectures and open source libraries, which will make some tech geeks happy.  

Ecommerce conversion optimization vendor Fast Simon has launched a new tool to personalize experiences for anonymous audiences.  It works with website shopper behavior data, which it can track over time without capturing customer identities. The system can also use data imported from a CDP or other system if customers do identify themselves.

Have you spent a lot of time pondering the difficulty of sending real-time transaction alerts? Me neither. But the folks at MoEngage did, and are oh so proud that they’ve added transaction alerting to their outbound campaigns and website personalization tools. Apparently it’s trickier than you think.

One charmingly consistent quirk of survey research is that people overstate their importance.  This Citrix study of CIOs is an extreme case in point: two-thirds of respondents say the CIO is second only to the CEO in terms of delivering business strategy, and nearly as many expect tech leaders to be largely or entirely responsible for marketing, sales, customer experience, employee experience, talent recruitment, financial performance and pretty much everything else in the next five years.  Silly CIOs: we all know that newsletter editors are really in charge.

On the off chance that CIOs really do take over the world, you’ll be interested that Foundry reports 74% of IT decision makers prefer vendors who educate them and 98% want content tailored to their industry, company size, job responsibilities and installed tech platforms.  Also, their attention spans are shrinking: they now spend more time watching videos and have less patience for written materials.  The desired maximum length shrank from 9.6 pages in 2016 to under 5 pages in 2022.

Meanwhile, data collection firm Rep Data analyzed 1,800 survey responses and found that answers from mobile devices are less reliable than replies from desktop, laptop and tablet users.  More interesting: people with at least a master’s degree give lower quality answers than less educated respondents.  Answers from those who didn’t finish high school are even worse.  I wonder which category has the most CIOs?

D4T4 Solutions is the latest CDP vendor to announce a Salesforce AppExchange integration.  Celebrus CDI for Salesforce makes 200+ data elements in the Celebrus CDP available to Salesforce Marketing Cloud applications.  This is about easier access to a company’s own (first-party) data, not adding access to third-party data.

Brand safety used to be mostly about keeping your ads off inappropriate websites.  Today there are lots of other places advertisers might not want to be.  DoubleVerify is addressing one possibility with two products to monitor brand safety and contextual suitability of ads on the LinkedIn Audience Network.

Pixability, whose core business has been classifying online video content, is tackling brand suitability for CTV.  They’ll be doing frame-by-frame program analysis so advertisers can track both brand safety and contextual relevance.  That sort of information has been hard to find.

Freshpaint, which offers no-code connectors to capture and activate customer data, has added $14.5 million in funding and a freemium starter product.  The company says that “all the existing tools to collect and use customer data were specifically built for developers who live in the codebase, so we set out to make customer data accessible to everyone who is not a software engineer.”  Some people may disagree.