CDP Institute

You may or may not mourn the loss of third party cookies. Some unambiguously cheerful news is that CDP Blueshift has added channel engagement scores to its predictive modeling studio. The customizable models estimate how likely each customer is to engage on each channel and can be used to automatically pick the best one.

Back to coronavirus. CDP Optimove has launched a live daily webcast on how the pandemic is impacting marketers. Other CDP vendors are also addressing the topic but I’m not aware of anyone else doing it daily.

Data orchestration vendor Openprise has launched Openprise Agile CDP. The system focuses on B2B data management including unification, enrichment, normalization, and lead-to-account matching. It also enables users to create automated business processes such as lead routing that are tightly integrated with marketing automation and CRM systems.

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?

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.