CDP Institute

So many companies are offering free use of their software to at-home workers that it’s not even worth listing them. But location data vendor Unacast has taken a different approach, developing a “social distancing dashboard” that analyzes its consumer tracking data to show much people are reducing their daily travel on a state and county level. The practical value is probably limited but gives you something to explore.

Many marketers are torn right now between putting out messages that show they are addressing coronavirus and just saying nothing.

Look, we’re as concerned about coronavirus as anyone. But apart from our sock puppet videocast, we think our best contribution is to keep things as normal as possible. So we’ll cover normal news today, starting with extension to mobile of Movable Ink’s personalized message rendering platform. Content dynamically adjusts to location, individual data, and other variables.

And what could be more normal than ad fraud? Arkose Labs, which helps to prevent it, has raised a $22 million Series B. The system fights account takeover, fake accounts, scraping, spam and gift card abuse. Huzzah!

Come to think of it, consumers liking free stuff may be the most normal thing of all. Sure enough, ad verification vendor Integral Ad Science has found that people are eager to swap paid video streaming services for free ones, even if they have to watch ads in return. Also included: a handy diagram that clarifies the often-confused relationships among Over The Top (OTT), Connected TV (CTV) and Smart TV.

Here’s the latest from our Department of the Obvious: a Digital Media Solutions survey showing that few marketers fully understand privacy regulations. Take the quiz, see how you rate, and maybe learn something new! Makes a great trivia game for virtual happy hour.

More obviousness: PagerDuty reports that unplanned work leads to stressed IT workers. Obvious but still worth remembering the next time offers you a free chatbot or conferencing system to deal with working from home.

A report the other day said the London Police were blasting “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from a boat in the Thames. In that spirit, here’s some good news: you don’t have to worry that this report from Alyce found companies do a poor job in picking the swag they give away at conferences. Remember conferences?

Next up is chatbot builder Ada, whose press release is suspiciously packed with buzzwords including Automated Customer Experience, Natural Language Understanding, and no-code drag-and-drop interface. That’s just how a robot would write it. They’re raised a $44 million Series B or maybe their robot convinced someone else’s robot to wire that money into its private account.

Finally we have ViralGains, which creates interactive video ads that lead users through journeys tailored to their responses. Their latest creation, VoiceAlike, cuts those pesky humans out of the process by using AI to predict their responses when they don’t actually answer. It’s not as crazy as it sounds (predictions are based on actual behavior of similar users) and lets ViralGains select the most appropriate next steps for each person.

Am I the only one who suspects that all those offices left empty while everyone works from home are actually swarming with robots who are writing press releases about themselves? That would explain why today’s news is all about AI. First up: mobile customer engagement platform Sinch has purchased ChatLayer.ai, which builds multi-lingual, multi-channel conversation-bots that are clearly smarter than I am.

My best three items today are all about B2B marketing, but I know it’s not your favorite topic, Dear Reader, and at the end of such a rough week I want to share something you’ll like. So let’s instead lead with a report that dynamic content vendor LiveIntent has found that email newsletter open rates are notably higher this week. It’s true that the reason is people are stuck at home due to coronavirus but we’ll take good news where we find it.