CDP Institute

Speaking of good looks, MailChimp has added a unified interface and repositioned itself as an all-in-one marketing platform. Users get email, landing pages, display ads, social posting, audience management, content creation, smart recommendations, and more. Pricing starts at $199 per month if I read their Web page correctly.

Omeda is a sort of all-in-one system for publishers, combining a CDP, marketing automation, display ads, and social marketing. They just added a “content metering” tool that lets marketers create custom flows that present different messages as users consume gated content. Fancy.

Hi, it’s Jamie, the CDP Institute’s Department of the Obvious intern. The boss went overboard celebrating Mothers Day so he asked me to fill in. We’ll start with an IAB report on video viewing, which found that people watch for different reasons during different parts of the day. And that younger online viewers watch more digital video than older viewers. In fact, 18-to-34 year olds are almost five times more likely to stream daily than people over age 55.

This report from GlobalWebIndex is a gold-mine of obviousness. Not only did they find that young people consume more online media, but they also found that mobile devices are more popular than big-screen platforms and digital is more popular than traditional media. Lots of unobvious detail by channel, country, and age if you want it.

Sprout Social earns an obviousness stripe for reporting that Facebook is the most popular social channel. They get two more stripes for finding that social posts with discounts are most likely to encourage shopping while entertaining posts are most likely to be shared. Less obvious: despite all the bad publicity, nearly 45% of consumers have increased social media usage in the past six months.

Lots of useful tidbits in this report from Symantec.  Turns out that 41% of U.S. consumers experienced cybercrime in the past 12 months and 65% expect to experience it in the coming 12 months; 84% want do more to protect their privacy but 43% don’t know how; 28% of social media users deleted an account due to privacy concerns in the past 12 months; 20% would give away their Internet search history for free while 45% would not sell it for any price. And so much more.

Episerver has also published a good report covering some of the same turf. They highlight the tension between personalization and privacy: 26% of shoppers say personalized experience is a higher priority now than last year yet 44% say respecting anonymity is also a higher priority. Personalized Web site while free shipping (67%) ranks first.

I have many more surveys but think it’s more interesting that direct-to-consumer razor merchant Harry’s is being bought for $1.37 billion by Edgewell Personal Care, which owns Schick razors, Banana Boat sunscreen, Web Ones wipes, and more. Goes to show the growing importance of direct commerce, which lets brands bypass Amazon and is powered by customer data.

Open source Web site vendor Acquia has purchased Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. The company says the merger will create the first-ever “open marketing cloud”, something you might not have known you wanted. Mautic, launched in 2014, claims over 250,000 users.

Looking for more ways to merge marketing automation and Web sites? Act-On Software just added real-time personalized web content recommendations to its own marketing automation platform. Visitors will get an “intelligent recommendations tray” on every Web page plus a personalized “My Library”. The new module can be purchased as part of Act-On marketing automation or separately for as little as $20,000 per year.

Why should marketing automation users have all the fun? Marketing agency Mediagistic has unveiled AdFluence, an event-triggered advertising service that can launch or expand pre-built ad campaigns based on triggers such as local weather or sports events. Ads can run on social media networks or programmatic exchanges.

After much breathless press speculation, Google announced incremental changes in how cookies are handled in its Chrome browser. Some data sharing will be blocked and users will gain more fine-grained control over how they are tracked. It was more roadmap than roadblock but still a step forward.