CDP Institute

Data-driven advertising is the foundation of Facebook’s wealth, but mobile analytics firm Ogury found that 90% of mobile users find targeted ad messages annoying and 54% say the most annoying thing is that they’re irrelevant. They conclude that advertisers on Facebook and elsewhere aren’t getting as much value from their data as they think.

Marketers hoping to escape the grip of Facebook and other walled gardens are eyeing direct-to-consumer business models. In the finest “sell shovels to gold miners” tradition, entrepreneurs are building services to help. One entrant is The DTX Company, which just announced Unbox, a platform for brands to reach consumers through events, TV, and other channels that are anything-but-Amazon, Google, and Facebook. They’ll use plenty of data to match the right channels to the right people.

Money money money. I avoided funding announcements on Wednesday but I can’t resist sharing that privacy management vendor OneTrust has raised a $200 million Series A. Yes, privacy is big business and getting bigger.

Signavio also took a dip into the money pool, coming out with a $177 million Series C. They sell systems for business process management, which is relevant here because some of those processes involve customer experiences. Total funding is now $230 million.

NewsCred helps companies plan, execute, and measure content marketing programs. Not as sexy as privacy (who ever thought they’d be reading that?) but still important. They’ve just taken $20 million in new funding, bringing their total to about $109 million.

Just two days after the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced a record $240 million GDPR fine for British Airways, the ICO announced a $123 million penalty against Marriott. Like the British Airways fine, this was for a data breach. But it does suggest that marketers should pay serious attention to the ICO’s savage criticism of real time ad bidding.

In a survey taken before the UK ICO’s recent actions, U.S. and UK consumers had largely given up on expecting government protection for their online data. The June 2019 survey, from privacy protection company Figleaf, found that just 32% of US and UK consumers felt online privacy was possible, compared with 61% in a similar March 2018 survey. The number believing that privacy is a government responsibility fell from 75% to 6% during the same period.

Despite consumer doubts, marketers have clearly begun to think that privacy is good business. Exhibit 1: when Marketing software company Cheetah Digital announced purchase of interactive experience platform Wayin, they described it in terms of collecting “zero party data” for permission-based marketing. Exhibit 2: Neustar has opened its “Identity Data Management Platform” to data from Freckle, which pays consumers directly for access to their information.

I usually prioritize acquisition and funding announcements, but don’t think you really care that Coveo bought Tooso for intent analytics, Sinequa raised $23 million for knowledge discovery, or Signpost raised $52 million for local business marketing. But you probably are interested that Facebook has made an open source release of its Deep Learning Recommendation Model to select personalized contents. You’ll recall that Google and Amazon recently made similar moves.

You may also be excited – or horrified – that video automation vendor Rocketium has announced a solution that can create thousands of videos per minute. “Online commerce companies like Amazon and Zillow have images, features, and prices for every product in their database. With a few lines of code and Rocketium automation, they can convert this data to explainers, recommendation videos, and personalized GIFs for emails or ads,” the company promises.

Oddly enough, we have a second announcement today about automated video creation. This is from GliaStudio, which enables “customers to generate quality videos simply from their news content, social posts, live sports events, and even statistical data in minutes.” They’ve just made this available on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.

Maybe you’re bored with blockchain but it’s still worth reporting that Cere Network has received funding for “the world’s first blockchain Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) ecosystem”. Encrypted personal activity data will be stored on a blockchain and sold in a marketplace. Which is pretty much how personal data is now stored and sold without blockchain.