CDP Institute

Marketers often offer a personalized experience as a reason for consumers to share their data. But the Advertising Research Foundation found that consumers are more likely to share when it isn’t mentioned. The difference was slight but it’s still more proof that people just don’t want to be reminded how their data is used. Lots more here.

Retailers may be realizing that personalization isn’t as powerful as conventional wisdom suggests. OneMarket found the most common use for customer identity systems is to verify eligibility for targeted discounts, while personalized product recommendations ranked last. A surprisingly high 29% said they could tie ad impressions to subsequent behavior in physical, Web, and mobile apps. Much more here on the topic.

CDP Simon Data announced a $30 million Series C funding, bringing total funding to $59 million. Simon positions itself as “the first and only CDP with a fully-integrated marketing cloud” although it stops at orchestration, leaving message delivery to external systems.

Adtech vendor Adform has launched a new cross-device graph, which it says removes the need for an external cross-device vendor. In plainer English, it identifies multiple devices per cookie, enabling advertisers to target people across devices and to limit impressions per person. Adform builds its graph with data from its ad buying and serving businesses.

Amobee, another adtech firm, has built its own cross-device graph by mapping devices and cookies to households. These can then be targeted through connected TVs and other devices. It has just added more than 60,000 audience segments based on data from more than sixty providers. Marketers can also build segments using their own data.

Blockchain often seems over-hyped but one application that always made sense was streamlining the digital ad supply chain. Sure enough, a pilot run by IBM, Unilver, and others has yielded an average two to three percent savings. That’s a small fraction of what goes to intermediaries and fraudsters but presumably benefits will grow over time.

One challenge with digital ads is knowing whether they were actually seen. Google has just announced it will support the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK, which will make it easier to track mobile ad viewability. The SDK simplifies advertisers’ lives by letting one tag feed data to multiple measurement vendors.

Marketing data orchestration vendor Openprise is also making measurement easier, in their case by adding new campaign attribution capabilities. Openprise offers data quality, segmentation, lead routing and other types of processing. It moves data between systems rather than maintaining its own database, so it’s not a CDP. If you wondered.

Podcast ads are growing: revenue will total nearly $700 million this year and $1 billion by 2021, says the IAB. Adobe found that 60% of listeners have looked up a product after hearing it mentioned in a podcast ad and 25% have made a purchase. You won’t be surprised that Millennials are the most frequent listeners.

One obstacle to selling podcast ads is lack of data about the listeners. Spotify has just released a dashboard that will offer profiles of listeners’ age, gender, location, music tastes and how long they listened to an episode. That should help.

Veritone One has an AI system that listens to podcasts to determine their content. They just announced that podcasting platform ART19 will use it to automatically match podcast ads with suitable content. Veritone also just added an option to pay podcasters based on purchases tied to promotion codes a podcaster has shared.

You probably don’t need convincing that chat is important. But you might still be surprised that the function has become so quickly commoditized that Shopify is now offering it at no extra cost. The new tool will show up on all pages of a Shopify ecommerce site.