CDP Institute

NTT Data asked consumers directly about their top service frustrations and got quite different results from CCW: multiple transfers (12%) ranked far behind long wait times (43%), inability to reach a real person (20%) and uninformed agents (15%). Go figure. If you’re thinking automation will reduce wait times, consider this: 94% of consumers prefer a live agent, mostly because virtual agents often fail to resolve their problems. NTT does see change on the way as virtual agents get better.

Mobile advertising is hot: mobile accounted for 57% all digital ad revenue in 2017, according to a study from Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Mobile grew at 36% while all of digital grew 21% to reach $88 billion. Spend on mobile video alone was $6.2 billion, also more than half the video total of $11.9 billion.

All that growth makes mobile adtech (mobtech?) a good business to be in. Moloco, which provides infrastructure to run ads on mobile apps, just raised an $11 million Series B.

Growth also attracts fraudsters. Mobile measurement specialist Adjust found mobile ad fraud rates in first quarter of 2018 have doubled since the year before. Click here for a handy-if-terrifying explanation of the many ways mobile fraud can happen.

Let’s go full tin-foil-hat paranoid today. We’ll start with news that GDPR will make cybercrime easier because security researchers won’t have access to domain owner information on the Whois database. An unintended side effect – or is it?

And then there’s news that Facebook and Google have made ad attribution harder by limiting ability to track individual users. In the name of privacy, of course, but the result is marketers have fewer ways to independently measure ad performance. Apple recently increased marketers’ direct access to attribution data but you can argue that’s a ploy to increase their power by harming independent attribution vendors.

And if you want Internet-quality evidence that big tech is aiming for total social control, check out this 2016 video from Google. They say it’s just a thought experiment. But that’s what you’d expect them to say.

CDP vendor Optimove has acquired email dynamic content technology DynamicMail from native advertising vendor PowerInBox. The technology can update email content when an email is opened. Optimove says it sent more than 3 billion emails last year.

Did someone mention email? Nearly half (47%) of respondents to a survey from GetResponse and SmartInsights rated email effectiveness as good or excellent, considerably ahead of any other channel. Yet just 17% do anything more than basic segmentation, 60% don’t test anything, and 53% do no segmentation at all. So there’s great room for improvement.

More bad news: when CRM vendor SuperOffice signed up anonymously to 1,000 B2B email lists, 59% of the companies sent nothing within 90 days. Other worst practices: 8% lacked an unsubscribe link, 9% sent emails after an unsubscribe attempt and 18% were not mobile-friendly.

CDP vendor Segment has released its previously-announced Personas feature, which builds unified, real-time customer profiles including computed values and makes them available to external systems via exports and API access. Segment had previously loaded, stored, and shared customer data but hadn’t automatically created unified profiles.

Here’s another hat in the GDPR ring: SAP’ has launched a trio of Customer Data Cloud from Gigya solutions, including identity, consent, and profile managers. SAP bought the Gigya identity management system last September for $350 million.