CDP Institute

Ecommerce is already booming without Facebook’s help, in case you haven’t heard. Contentsquare supports the industry with advanced analytics and AI-powered recommendations, evaluating ten trillion (with a “t”) consumer interactions per day. They just raised a $190 million Series D, brining total funding to $310 million.

AI-powered recommendations are great but racial, gender, and other biases are a known problem. Customer engagement vendor Pega has added Ethical Bias Check, which simulates the results of an AI-driven strategy and checks if results skew towards or away from a particular group. We don’t know how well it works but give them credit for trying.

There’s a ton of good information in this just-released State of Marketing report from Salesforce. The headline from a CDP view is that high-performing marketers listed CDP as the second-most commonly used technology while CDP ranked fifth for moderate performers and sixth for underperformers. They survey doesn’t show how many actually have a CDP but 38% of the total and 48% of high performers said they plan to use it more next year.

Customer journey analysis vendor Pointillist also has a good new report. No specific mention of CDP but they did find that lack of a single customer view is the top customer experience challenge. Nearly one-third of high performers (31%) said they have accessible and unified customer data compared with 8% of average performers and 3% of underperformers. We all know correlation doesn’t prove causation but I know how I’m betting.

Finally: this B2B survey from Folloze, Campaign Stars, and Terminus offers hard-to-find data on market share by vendor for marketing automation, personalization, chatbots, sales enablement, and other software categories. Just seven percent report they have fully automated their personalization programs.

About five percent of all Tweets come from bots, with a rate as high as 20% for trending hashtags like #COVID-19, according to a study from NortonLifeLock. Perhaps more interesting, they just released a free test version of a browser extension that can classify individual Tweets in your personal Twitter feed.

You’re never terribly interested in non-CDP data management technology, Dear Reader, but I still like to remind you occasionally that it exists. So here’s a random piece of news that data quality and governance vendor Infogix has upgraded its Data360® platform to validate the quality of streaming messages in Kafka and added a tool to visually research data assets.

You also have little interest in security or access management, but those are important too. So I’ll mention that access management vendor CyberArk is spending $70 million to buy Idaptive, which uses AI to identify questionable access requests.

Facebook is purchasing .gif platform Giphy for a reported $400 million. Half of Giphy’s traffic comes from non-Facebook properties, so the deal will expand Facebook’s ability to observe and profit from behavior elsewhere. The deal won’t put a dent in Facebook’s $60 billion cash hoard.

Nearly all consumers (88%) are aware that Web sites and apps like Giphy collect their data for advertising purposes, according to Integral Ad Science, even though many fewer want that to happen: just 41% would trade personal data for personalized ads on a social media site like Facebook. A startling 55% are not aware of any legislation that regulates use of their data.

Facebook isn’t just for consumer marketers: it’s the most widely used channel and most effective lead generator for B2B marketers, reports B2B agency Wpromote. Their survey, taken in February, found for the first time that more B2B digital marketers started the year intending to focus on brand awareness (31%) than quality leads (25%). Wpromote thinks the pandemic reinforces that priority but they also report that 49% of marketers now expect a budget cut, compared with just 13% in February.

Remember when retailers competed to give the most enticing personal experience, and not on being least likely to cause a deadly disease? In-store wireless network provider Datavalet just released a reminder of those simpler times: a system that tracks visitors through a wi-fi network, builds profiles by ingesting purchase and behavior data, and executes rule-based marketing campaigns in real time. It can also connect to external marketing campaign systems and messaging apps.