CDP Institute

When it comes to honking big piles of identity data, Acxiom LiveRamp is one of the biggest. They’ve just added IdentityLink for Television, which uses customer identities to connect advertising data with TV viewership data. Good for media planning, attribution, and cross channel campaigns.

Why so much interest in AI-based analytics? Because it’s really hard to do the old-fashioned way. This survey from natural language tech vendor Narrative Science finds that 62.5% of business decision makers say their biggest pain point is reports that don’t explain what the data means, while 53.8% of report authors say their biggest pain is lack of time do to in-depth analysis.

AI vendors are careful to claim their tools will augment not replace human analysts, but who are they kidding?

Lots of AI-based analytics news today. We have Series A fundings from Luminoso ($12.6 million to do natural language analysis such as analyzing customer comments, understanding inquiries, and conversational search) and from Tellius ($7.5 million for a natural language query engine that finds interesting insights based on patterns within giant data sets.) Barking up the same tree, Clearstory Data has launched ‘Instant Data Discovery’ to find insights within blended data sets created by their automated data harmonization tools.

You knew this was coming: location data is now so easily available that someone is giving it away. Location analytics vendor Placed is giving free access to visitor traffic data for 1,900 major businesses, including giant chains such as Walmart, McDonalds, and Starbucks. They hope to spur demand by educating the market.

Want to use that local traffic data to target local advertising on YouTube? It takes a separate campaign for each market – potentially hundreds of thousands. Yuck! But local marketing tech vendor Netsertive has solved the problem, automatically creating the campaigns and localizing the creative. Huzzah! But you’ll have to wait a bit longer: commercial release is a few months away.

Did you wake up this morning wondering what impact artificial intelligence has already had ad agencies and marketers? AI-based marketing platform vendor Albert took a survey to find out. Bottom line: brands are less impressed than agencies but nearly everyone has seen some benefit. Download for details.

Customer success technology vendor Totango announced a $9 million Series D funding, bringing its total to $36.3 million. Systems like Totango connect data from all sources to build a complete customer view, but they’re not CDPs unless they also expose the raw details to other systems.

Customer service isn’t the same thing as customer success.  Customer service vendor Aspect found that use of voice channels has decreased compared with online channels, even though customers prefer voice to everything except in-person interactions. Presumably the reason is that companies are pushing online options. This may be why consumers rated choice of channel as more important than personalized treatments. Aspect smells a business opportunity: 75% of consumers said they’d pay more for exceptional service.

Customer experience (CX) includes service, support, marketing, operations, and pretty much everything else. CX agency Verndale found the biggest challenges cited by CX professionals were lack of real-time data and operationalizing CX insights. Personalization was 9th from the top. Yet 92% said personalization is crucial to good CX and 51% said their organizations can’t deliver the personalization their customers want. No simple answers but much food for thought.

Amazon has spent a reported $1billion-plus to acquire video doorbell maker Ring, whose technology could help drop packages inside of shoppers’ homes. Now we know why Amazon has rejected calls to #BoycottNRA: it wants to sell Ring to home security-obsessed NRA members. Or at least prevent them from taking potshots at Amazon couriers.

#BoycottNRA hold-outs Google, Apple, and FedEx also sell home monitoring devices and make deliveries. Just saying.  Meanwhile, Facebook has dodged the NRA bullet and announced a $3 million investment in “Local News Subscription Accelerator”. The project will help local news organizations recover some of the business they’ve lost in recent years to, um, Facebook. Would it be rude to note that Facebook earned $109 per day in 2017?