CDP Institute

The Zaius CDP also has a new friend. It’s customer support vendor Zendesk, which will feed its data into Zaius to create a more complete customer view. Zaius also does personalization, marketing automation, and attribution.

Any headline about people wanting more government regulation has a certain man-bites-dog appeal.

I’ll do a little cherry-picking of my own to note that an Adobe survey found 26% of consumers listed too-creepy personalization as the biggest annoyance with brand content and 28% said they’re not comfortable sharing any information with brands.

Even the minority of people who care about privacy are usually willing to sell access to their data. Blockchain could facilitate this with low-overhead payments and automated execution. Malta-headquartered Thrive is working along those lines on a decentralized ad marketplace with payments made through private tokens. Pesky government regulators at the SEC won’t let U.S. citizens participate. You may recall we’ve covered somewhat similar offerings from Dabbl and IOTA.

I’m still not convinced that minor news about major vendors is the best use of this newsletter. But you seem to like it, Dear Reader. So here’s more. We’ll start with B2C marketing automation vendor Selligent repositioning itself as a marketing cloud including a Customer Data Platform. Data management capabilities do seem to meet CDP standards, including a highly customizable data structure and connectors for a wide variety of source and execution systems. We’re gonna need a bigger bandwagon.

Adobe’s latest announcement involves tighter integration among their content creation and marketing systems, which is boring unless you happen to use them. More intriguing was news that their Sensei artificial intelligence system can now automatically tailor content to individual preferences and specific devices. Their example is an online restaurant menu that only shows vegan food to vegans. This is where Adobe’s combination of creative and marketing systems really gets powerful.

Personalization vendor Monetate also has an AI-related announcement: they’ve added reporting to clarify the basis for their AI’s personalization decisions. This is noteworthy because AI’s inability to explain itself is often a stumbling block to adoption. Specifically, Monetate will now show which data categories most influenced individual decisions – a technique that’s been used for years with non-AI predictive models but is still not common in AI. The same information helps marketers uncover new customer segments.

Yesterday’s news about Acxiom turned out to be great click-bait. Who knew? So here’s more vendor news: personalization and CDP vendor Evergage is opening a European operation with headquarters in exotic Stuttgart.

Who put the fun in funding? Perhaps whoever put the steal in stealth. In any case, Attentive is a personalized mobile messaging platform for retailers that just emerged from stealth with a $13 million Series A. They’ve found that text outperforms email to the tune of 10X more revenue per contact. No mess in those messages.

There might be some ire in acquire but this is getting tired. We’ll just report that B2B data enrichment vendor FullContact is buying Contacts+, a mobile contact management app with millions of users. FullContact mostly feeds it data into other systems through APIs but it does have its own mobile app, so this will expand its user base.

It may be even less clear why you should care that marketing data and services giant Acxiom has reorganized itself into separate data and services units.

Coincidentally, we have a survey from data vendor Experian, which last year spun off its own marketing services business as Cheetah Digital.