CDP Institute

Amazon Web Services is making life easier with enhancements to its Redshift database, which many firms use to hold customer data. Changes will improve performance, simplify moving data from Redshift to the Amazon S3 data lake, and run federated queries to combine data in Redshift, S3, and other formats. The announcements were made at AWS’s re:Invent conference.

Cloud database Snowflake has launched a Private Data Exchange that makes it easier for companies to share their data with authorized partners. Direct data sharing –a.k.a. second party data – is increasingly important as privacy regulations reduce access to third party data.

The good news: Video sharing app Loom has raised a $30 million Series B. Loom positions itself as a communication tool – more Slack than Snap. More evidence of the growing importance of video.

The bad news: adtech vendor and erstwhile CDP IgnitionOne is going out of business. There was no formal announcement but creditors and investors have been notified that the company is selling its assets to help pay its debts. More evidence of adtech’s deepening woes.

The mixed news: the Firefox browser will block a standard ID designed to help advertisers track users without third-party cookies. The ID is being developed by the DigiTrust consortium, a project led by the industry group IAB Tech Lab. Whether this is good or bad news depends on your attitude towards privacy.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute’s Department of the Obvious. Everyone else had the weekend off but I stayed behind to stoke the furnace and watch the fax machines. In return, the boss let me write today’s newsletter. We’ll start with this Forrester study for survey company FocusVision, which reported that “the way customers think and feel about an experience can predict how they will act toward a brand.” In case you were wondering.

Retail tech firm Aptos probed for consumer insights and hit the mother lode of obvious. My personal favorite is that people shop in stores because they like to “touch, feel and try on goods before they buy.” Runners up: shoppers will look elsewhere if an item is out of stock or they can find a lower price. And so much more.

This Medallia study isn’t packed with obvious results but holds a few good nuggets. Customer experience leaders are more likely to use multiple digital listening tools, to be “relentless” about using feedback to drive action, and to hold multiple departments responsible for CX. Less obvious: marketing ranked sixth and head of CX ranked seventh in CX responsibility. CEO, chief revenue officer, and head of account management were most often responsible.

Next we have Vibenomics, which just raised $5 million in additional seed funding for “place-based audio experience solutions”, which is a super-fancy way of saying background music. They also run “the industry’s first audio out-of-home (OOH) programmatic advertising marketplace”, thereby combining at least three hot trends in a single product.

Finally, ViSenze reports that more than half of U.S. consumers (54%) are excited by visual search, vastly more than shoppable content (43%), product recommendations (40%), augmented reality (21%) or chatbots (7%). A whopping 87% would be more likely to buy a product if its image were easily searchable on their smartphone. You get the picture.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter V. We’ll start with VTEX, an integrated commerce platform that just raised $140 million in what’s apparently its first investment round. The 20-year-old vendor supports more than 2,500 online stores in 28 countries. It’s a helpful reminder that not every major system is owned by one of the giant software vendors.

We have a trio of AI stories today, Dear Reader. First up is Pathfinder, an e-commerce add-on that modestly claims to write copy, design banners, build opt-in forms, create multi-step campaigns, run tests, track results, and converse via text messages. Pricing starts at free and is just $184 per month for an unlimited number of skills and 10,000 contacts. They just launched a Shopify integration.