CDP Institute

What, you don’t care about B2B data? Then here’s some CDP news: CDP and loyalty vendor SessionM has enhanced the loyalty portion of its system with more flexible award structures. Also, retail-oriented CDP Manthan is now using AI to update its customer profiles and individual-level product and offer recommendations.

Salesforce announced Customer 360, which provides a unified view of customer data in its B2C Marketing, Commerce, and Service Clouds. Data will be accessed via API connections without exporting it into a separate CDP-style database. Over at Customer Experience Matrix, David Raab was not impressed.

Customer 360 can also use Saleforce-owned MuleSoft to incorporate data from non-Salesforce sources. MuleSoft today announced its own enhancements, most notably use of machine learning to recommend data mapping and transformations. Other companies do this too – it helps to remove one of the major bottlenecks in the customer data assembly process.

Personal identity vendor LiveRamp has added an API to integrate its AbiliTec offline identity resolution platform with external systems. Its press release features quotes from CDPs BlueConic and RedPoint Global as sample users. This highlights an often-misunderstood fact: many CDPs rely on external technology for identity resolution, in part because identity resolution often uses external data with connections not available within a company’s own data.

Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP announced an “Open Data Initiative” including a public, extensible data model and shared data lake on Microsoft Azure. The project is in early stages, with engineers from the three companies still working to reconcile their individual models. This Adobe blog post suggests that Adobe has already published schemas to help share data among its own systems. For an assessment of what this means for CDPs, see this post on Customer Experience Matrix.

CDP mParticle has added an integration to upload mobile app events to Facebook’s advertising platform in real time. This program will save marketers the effort of developing custom data feeds into Facebook. Good to know that Facebook’s other problems haven’t stopped it from finding ways to capture more data.

Marketing data and services vendor V12 has launched an “integrated CDP solution” that combines first and third party data, multi-channel integration, automated emails, and analytics. V12 can populate the system with its own third party data, a feature that’s recently started to showing up in more CDPs. Offerings include marketing execution and services, which may place the system beyond the CDP Institute’s definition of CDP as “packaged software”.

It’s hard not to be snarky about this: someone at Amazon thought a voice-powered microwave with automated popcorn replenishment was worth a press release. Maybe they were being ironic. If you insist on taking this seriously, it illustrates continued progress in voice-based consumer interfaces. Amazon released a dozen other voice-powered devices as well.

Salesforce has joined the speech party with Einstein Voice, which lets users update CRM records by vocally describing an interaction. The system’s natural language AI identifies the appropriate records and data fields and updates them. Intriguing but you’d want to test very carefully for accuracy. They also announced a product that lets users create their own voice bots for public use.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but we also have a report that security researchers have shown a second-hand Amazon Echo can spy on people. This is so not surprising that we almost handed it over to our Department of the Obvious. Better news: the California legislature has passed a law setting security regulations for Internet of Things devices. This Digital Trends article says the law leaves much to be desired. But it’s a start.

CDP vendor Segment has launched Protocols, a data governance platform. It positions the tool as completing a “Customer Data Infrastructure” that also includes Segment’s original data collection product, now called Connections, and audience management tool Personas, launched last October. Segment says that CDPs “do not collect complete or accurate data” but its new infrastructure does.

Marketing intelligence platform Singular has raised a $30 million Series B to grow its own business of unifying marketing data. Singular works with user-level data and creates audience segments, with its main focus on mobile and Web advertising sources, attribution, and analytics. It provides its own reporting and segmentation tools rather than integrating with third party products like a true CDP.