CDP Institute

We’re not geeky enough to note that William Shatner was launched into space today, but we will report the launch of an AI-based system for marketing attribution.  Alembic ingests content and related web, mobile, social, and news, transaction and conversion events; converts it all into a time series; and estimates the impact of influencers, campaigns, and channels.  Who said there’s no intelligent life on this planet?

Let’s boldly go with more AI news: no-code analytics platform SparkBeyond just launched a tool that promises, or threatens, to auto-generate hypotheses and then checks whether they’re correct.  Hypothesis generation is apparently the sort of thing that data scientists feel they can do better than machines because it involves human insight.  SparkBeyond goes with brute force, testing millions of hypotheses in minutes.

CDPs used outside of marketing are a long-term trend. We have two examples today. First is Treasure Data’s new “CDP for Service”, which provides tighter integration between the CDP and Zendesk, Salesforce, and Genesis customer service systems. Key benefits include letting agents see the customer profile stored in Treasure Data and providing AI-driven recommendations to guide agent actions.

ActionIQ is supporting marketing and non-marketing activities in the healthcare industry by adding HIPAA certification.  We don’t usually report when a CDP vendor adds a new certification but I have a trend quota to meet.

LiveRamp is expanding in a different direction by adding an enhanced TV platform.  It will use LiveRamp’s individual identifier, RampID, to connect data about advertising audiences and results across linear TV, streaming TV, and digital video.  Partners include Innovid, E.W. Scripps Company, Publica, Philo, Plex, Univision and Dish.

Let’s read some consumer tea leaves today, Dear Reader.  This Attest Technologies survey finds that the seemingly endless growth of subscription programs may in fact have peaked: just 41% of consumers reported having a product subscription in their August 2021 survey, compared with 47% the previous November.  At-home delivery was the most popular reason to subscribe, and presumably that will become less important as the pandemic winds down.

Another long-term trend that may be overstated is consumers’ desire to do business with companies that share their values.  Pan Communications puts it in perspective: 72% of consumers said they’d choose a company with a great product or service over a company that stands for a specific mission.  If you’re surprised by that, you have a great future in some field that’s not marketing.

Speaking of things that shouldn’t surprise you: consumers use social media even though they know it’s bad for them. Reboot Foundation found that more than half of respondents felt social media made them feel bad, but only one-third had taken steps to cut back and over 70% said you’d have to pay them at least $10,000 to quit. Similarly, The Verge found that unfavorable opinions of social media increased during the pandemic, but consumers still see Facebook as the best way to connect with friends and family.  

Sorry to start your week with bad news, but Boathouse reports that just 34% of big company CEOs have great confidence in their CMO. The CEOs come across as pretty paranoid in that study, but maybe they have a point: Capgemini found just 43% of marketers said they are actually using data to guide their marketing strategies. (Forty-five percent say they have a CDP.) Then again, 46% of C-level executives themselves choose gut instinct over data sometimes (25%) or often (21%), data and analytics leaders told Alation. Lots more detail... Read More >

I trust that you, Dear Reader, are in that data-driven minority.  So you’ll be happy to learn that Neustar has launched a real-time marketing optimization platform powered by its detailed data on consumers activities.  It’s all here: marketing mix models, multi-touch attribution, data clean room, cookie-free measurement, person-level exposure tracking, journey analytics, and a cure for baldness.  (They didn’t mention baldness but I think it’s implied.)

Omnichannel marketing platform ActiveCampaign has expanded its customer data management features by enabling users to build automation flows that access custom objects in CRM, support, ecommerce, and other integrated systems.  It’s the sort of thing you’d pull data into a CDP to do, but it seems that ActiveCampaign reads data in the source systems without making its own copy.

I’ve already admitted my infatuation with retailer-owned media networks (and will sneak in that Adorama has a new program for onsite ad placements). But why should retailers have all the fun? Video creation platform Brightcove has launched CorpTV, which lets any brand bypass traditional media by creating its own streaming video channel. Recently-launched Salesforce+ is an example.