CDP Institute

We’ve been trying to find an Intern for our Department of Irony but no one takes the ad seriously. This means our regular staff had to cover this apparently-real report that ScentAir, which sprays mood-setting aromas around stores, theaters, hotels, and other places, has upped its game by creating a “cloud-based scent marketing management platform.” Sadly, our regular writers aren’t witty enough to say something clever about this.

Customer Data Platforms remain a hot topic, thank goodness. Latest fuel on the fire is MarTech Advisor’s CDP buyer’s guide. Much wisdom and a broad list of vendors. And it’s free.

Few ideas generate more talk and less action than consumers selling access to their own data. One question is how many people are important enough to advertisers for their data to be in high demand. Mobile ad network ironSource may answer this with a new feature that lets app developers measure the ad revenue generated by individual users. The idea is to help app owners identify their most valuable users and find more like them.

Individuals might earn much less ad revenue if new privacy rules start to bite.

AI-driven marketing language generator Persado has added story-telling to its skills. But don’t get too excited: it’s not describing a sequence of events like what happened on its summer vacation. Rather, it’s writing copy snippets that reflect brand voice, seasonal themes, audience interests, and campaign goals. Still, it’s a step towards better AI-written copy. And, for now, what happened in Vegas still stays in Vegas.

AI might not yet be replacing copywriters, but it’s ready to replace annoying bosses who second-guess what copywriters produce. That seems to be the function of Qordoba, which “helps copywriters stay on-brand and on-message across user personas” by measuring emotion, brand adherence, language style, and tone in content. They just raised a $11.5 million Series B. Presumably Qordoba could evaluate Persado outputs but if that’s your idea of fun, you need to get out more.

Speaking of replaceable: we sometimes wonder why we’re paying Jamie, our Department of the Obvious Intern, to sit and read The New York Times. Then we remember he’s not paid. Jamie tells us that the latest scoop from The Time’s crack tech reporting team is that Internet of Things devices might spy on you. Wow.

Personalization platform Dynamic Yield has added “multi-touch campaigns”, which deliver different sets of messages to different customers across multiple touchpoints. This allows tests such as consistently offering 10% off to one customer group and free shipping to another. It requires identifying customers across channels during each interaction, which many testing systems can’t do. Dynamic Yield works across Web, email, mobile apps, and advertising.

Maybe you’re interested in the state of Customer Experience and maybe you aren’t. But check out Genesys’ CX survey if only for its cool interactive graphics. Lots of fun splits by region, industry, business department, and age group. For example: 27% of customer care professionals think bots won’t reduce customer care headcount but 62% of IT professionals think they will. You can probably win a bar bet by knowing which region is most fond of personalization, assuming you hang out in the right bars.

Data analysis platform Looker has announced special applications for digital marketing and Web analytics. The applications, now in public beta, provide prebuilt data structures and analytics. Looker combines data from multiple sources and makes it available for analysis and visualization. But it stores the data in a SQL database, making it more limited than most Customer Data Platforms.

Who ever thought the words “Adobe” and “fast-moving” would bes used in the same sentence? Yet just four months after finalizing its acquisition of ecommerce platform Magento, Adobe has released its first integrations with Experience Cloud. Magento gains cross-touchpoint shopping experiences, AI-powered personalization, and behavior predictions. Magento also announced other enhancements to its core capabilities.

Digital experience platform Sitecore has purchased Stylelabs, which offers digital asset management, marketing resource management, and product information management capabilities. Sitecore also announced enhancements to its core product, including a Javascript SDK to access its .NET functions, headless content applications, expanded use of AI, and more precise email governance.