CDP Institute

Here’s an excellent NTT Data survey on attitudes towards big data. You won’t be surprised that consumers are skeptical: while 65% of business executives said big data will be used to help consumers, just 40% of consumers agreed. The skepticism is justified: 80% of executives said their company gives strong protection to corporate data but just 42% said consumer data is strongly protected. Lots more about what’s creepy and how consumers are protecting themselves.

What’s in a name? Zaius meets the CDP definition of building and sharing a unified, persistent customer database. But they add marketing automation features that place them beyond the CDP realm. They’ve just announced an integration with ecommerce platform Shopify, which suggests they’re serving clients much smaller than most CDP vendors. Speaking of names: they have an endorsement on their Web site from someone named McGregor Button.

Crimson Hexagon is another cool name but the company is giving it up as a part of a just-announced merger with Brandwatch. Both companies play in the social media monitoring space. The combined firm will add data from other sources as well.

An uncool name wasn’t the main reason so few people used Google’s social media network Google+ although it probably didn’t help. The company today announced they were shutting down the consumer portion of Google+, although they’ll keep some corporate applications. They also described several new limits on data sharing, mentioned that a security bug exposed data from at least a half million accounts, and look, a squirrel!

Let’s skip today’s product news, which is all pretty minor. Instead, here’s Reltio, a Master Data Management vendor that also qualifies as a CDP, announcing they’ll support Salesforce Customer 360 and the Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and Salesforce. As if they had a choice. I liked how clear they made their real opinion of those approaches: “Common IDs and tight coupling of apps can solve some immediate problems, but in the long run still create new islands of data that ultimately spell trouble for customer 360 initiatives.”

Speaking of honesty, Publishing Executive found that the biggest obstacles to tech adoption are buyers’ time, resources, and budget, not integration or finding systems that fit their needs. That’s a truth not always acknowledged. The survey covered only publishers but other industries are similar. Other interesting data here too.

And since no day is complete without a little Facebook bashing, here’s an Interbrand report that Facebook is the only BadTech company to lose brand value since last year: Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft all gained (and rank first to fourth, in that order), while Facebook fell from eighth to ninth and lost six percent of its value. Don’t feel too sad for them: they’re still ahead of McDonalds, Intel and IBM.

Let’s do product news today. IBM has several recent announcements including AI-powered interactive advertisements (pretty cool), an AI-based programmatic ad bid optimizer, and AI-based audience targeting in conjunction with LiveRamp. Yesterday also saw the formal release of Watson Assistant for Marketing, a natural language reporting interface for IBM’s Campaign and digital marketing platforms that was announced last month.

Personalization platform Movable Ink announced its extension of its dynamic visual content beyond email to Web and display ads. Messages in the different channels are coordinated by a central orchestration engine that can draw on multiple data sources and automatically select top-performing creative versions.

Location platform Connecthings has launched Herow, which lets app developers create campaigns based on information about physical sites, precise tracking of mobile device user movements, and local conditions such as weather and traffic. The company also released a survey of mobile users that found their current apps get their location wrong 40% of the time, that 60% want mobile experiences customized to personal desires and location, and 72% don’t want their data shared with third parties.

CDP Arm Treasure Data has launched Audience Suite, a collection of features that make it easier for marketers to analyze and activate customer data. New capabilities include a complete customer profile on a single screen, guided segmentation interface, AI-based predictive analytics, and real-time personalization with prebuilt integration to common marketing applications.

A coalition of ad industry organizations has presented a draft “Data Transparency Label” to present standard information about audience data sets. It’s modeled on the nutritional labels that appear on foods, which frankly is a little weird. But the group promises to include an associated compliance program to ensure the information is accurate, which would be a big step forward for data buyers.