CDP Institute

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.

Advertisers often want to use customer data that belongs to someone else. Owners want to sell the data but keep control. PubMatic is addressing the problem with Audience Encore, which lets data owners apply their information to publishing audiences, and in turn lets publishers sell those audiences programmatically using “deal IDs” that don’t expose specific information. The point is you can target in a privacy-safe way.

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.

Staying positive, social analytics platform Nuvi has expanded its scope with a collection “social customer experience” solutions that include collaborative planning, collateral publishing, and social engagement. They’ve also upgraded their monitoring tools with more accurate sentiment prediction. Huzzah.

I got excited when I saw the headline announcing Sift’s new “insult monitor”, since it would be so helpful to have a system collect and present the best insults from across the Web. Unfortunately, they were referring to the “insult” of mistakenly rejecting legitimate transactions as fraudulent. But I can dream.

Marketers with well-integrated customer data show substantially better results than those who don’t, according to this study from CDP vendor Blueshift. Unfortunately, half (51%) don’t combine their data on a single platform. Download for details.

Self-service is one way for marketers to make more use of their data. Business intelligence vendor Domo has launched a no-code development environment to let non-technical users create apps that send them alerts when interesting things happen. Citizen developers can also create workflows that take actions.

Adobe has announced that Marketo users will be able to access content stored in its Adobe Experience Manager digital asset manager. I wouldn’t ordinarily report such a simple integration, especially when both products are owned by the same company. But we’ve been starved for news you find interesting, Dear Reader, and you do like articles about Adobe.

You haven’t been especially interested in Demandbase, Dear Reader, but at least this announcement involves customer data. Specifically, they have announced Data Stream, which lets users access all account-specific data in Demandbase for reporting and dashboards. I guess this means that all data within Demandbase wasn’t already accessible. We are shocked.

Yes, that’s clickbait.  But it’s still a real story: tech giants may share location data that would otherwise be private to trace the contacts of coronavirus patients. Whether or not you think this is a good idea, the thing to remember is how easily it can be done.

Proxy sells a mobile phone app that broadcasts an identity signal, avoiding the need for keys, ID cards or passcodes. It’s secure in that the signal is a single-use, encrypted token that only makes sense to user-authorized devices. But all bets are off if a phone gets lost or the user just wants a few moments of privacy. Anyway, they just raised a $42 million Series B, bringing their total to just over $60 million.