CDP Institute

Maybe the new oil is really shoppable video because…um…it reduces friction. Creative optimization company Clinch is helping it grow with real-time shoppable video ad units which don’t just build custom templates but use data (!) to pick the right offers for each viewer and situation.

What’s that, you thought identity data was the new oil? That means cookie replacements are like wind power.  The latest blast of hot air comes from Verizon Media, in the form of a unified solution called ConnectID. It can serve ads based on 900 million consumer relationships across 30+ Verizon Media brands including Yahoo!, HuffPost, AOL, and TechCrunch. It’s a closed universe, but a big one.

It’s always a good day when we have a CDP survey for you, Dear Reader. Twilio Segment reports that customer experience is the most common use case for CDPs (cited by 73%) and reliable, scalable customer data is the most common CDP business objective. Enthusiasm is high: 86% plan to continue using a CDP and 75% expect 5X or higher ROI from their CDP investment.

Have you taken a break from worrying how the loss of third-party cookies will impact ad targeting to worry instead how it will impact collection of B2B intent data? Sorry to spoil your fun, but ZoomInfo is way ahead you. They just announced Privacy Clusters, which uses cookie-free technology to find groups of anonymous devices associated with a particular company, extract company-level intent signals, and send targeted messages. Huzzah!

It took just one day after our privacy newsletter called out Microsoft’s Productivity Score as a surveillance nightmare for Microsoft to hide individual information. Okay, lots of other people raised the same issue. Regardless, it shows increasing awareness of workplace privacy issues, especially during the pandemic.

It feels odd to not write about Salesforce’s $28 billion Slack purchase but we already covered the rumor.

Looking at an even bigger picture, this Accenture report says companies really need to move past Customer Experience to Business Experience – something that includes non-customer-facing activities such as innovation, employee experience, products, and delivery models. Most CX experts would probably include those in their definition but then Accenture wouldn’t have a fun new buzzword, would they?

Narrowing the focus again, we have another contestant on Survivor: Cookie Replacement. This one comes from community-owned Prebid.org, which makes first-party ID PubCommon – developed by Epsilon, available for free, and used by thousands of publishers, we’re told – available as a third-party ID to use in programmatic ad bidding. Unless consumers opt out.

I had a better experience opening the WellCare replacement account, although the very nice agent kept telling me he was copying data into two different systems. He was intrigued to learn that products like ServiceNow can automate that sort of thing, although of course he wasn’t in a position to buy one. ServiceNow itself just bought Element AI, which will add more AI capabilities to their workflow automation. Price is estimated at $500 million.

CyberMonday may be the hardest day of the year for call centers, so I guess I’ll cut some slack to the company that – wait, they don’t deserve it. WellCare transferred me between five agents and still couldn’t complete an address change. I canceled my account. It’s the sort of outcome that makes customer service tech company Kustomer worth roughly $1 billion to Facebook, which just bought them.

I also gave up trying to upgrade my cable TV service after several agents quoted wildly different prices while (by the sound of it) sitting in the middle of a train station. They might have benefited from customer success platform Gainsight, which just sold a majority of its shares to Vista Equity Partners at a reported $1.1 billion valuation.

The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday has been accompanied by the traditional news famine, so we’re reduced to rumors. At least we have the juicy one that Salesforce is in talks to acquire messaging platform Slack. It would be another move for Salesforce beyond its stronghold in customer-facing systems.