CDP Institute

Speaking of unsurprising: Amazon has received a patent for a plan to let its delivery drones double as home surveillance devices. You probably assumed that were doing that already.

TV advertising “has lacked the ability to deliver people-based addressability and measurement across channels” says the gazillionth press release promising the “first” solution to this problem. Still, you might want to know that identity platform LiveRamp has purchased DataPlusMath, which somehow uses a Web site pixel to capture TV viewing. Now you do.

Current real time bidding processes for online ads grossly violate the European Union’s privacy rules, says a report from the UK’s Information Commissioner, who is in charge of such things. She cites both General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PERC). Enforcement actions haven’t followed but the message is clear.

Will tighter privacy regulation force companies to focus more on their existing customers? Separate reports from customer journey management vendors Kitewheel  and Pointillist both show high growth in the field. Less reassuring for marketers: journey management is more often controlled by customer experience departments than marketing.

Maybe marketers should just go back to buying broadcast TV. Industry trade group TVB thinks that would be fine. They just issued a report that finds traditional TV still has more influence on buying than any other medium.

Roughly half of ad buyers said they were using CDPs from Salesforce (62%), Oracle (45%), and Adobe (42%) before those products were released, according to research firm Advertiser Perceptions. I couldn’t find a copy of the study but Ad Exchanger says the author blamed the bizarre result on confusion about the definition of CDP.  It’s a testimony to brand power and reminder to treat survey results with caution.

Returning from la-la land, digital testing platform Optimizely has raised a $50 million Series D, bringing total funding to $200 million. Good to know there’s still some interest in reality-based decisions.

Meanwhile, IntentData.io has launched a company that sells intent data. They use public data to deliver intent linked to identified individuals, without violating privacy rules. If their Web site explains how they do this, I missed it.

We reported last week that Amazon was sharing its personalization algorithms. Today it’s Google’s turn: they have launched BigQuery ML, which builds machine learning models on data in the BigQuery data store. Users must know SQL but not Python or Java. Google even provided “tutorial-like” templates for customer segmentation, lifetime value prediction, and conversion prediction. So bright…so shiny…

Video ad creation platform VidMob has raised a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding to over $45 million. VidMob pushes video ads to social network, analyzes the impact of different attributes on results, and suggests improvements. The company calls this an “API for creativity”. We all knew that was coming.

Clear Channel Outdoor has more than 450,000 outdoor displays worldwide. At least some of those track nearby mobile devices, which lets the company profile ad audiences, measure campaign impact, and cross-target ads. The company is now letting advertisers upload their own customer data to its system to allow even richer analysis. Plenty of individual-level data here although it’s technically anonymous.

You probably don’t need evidence that CDPs are here to stay but I’ll share some anyway: Forrester Research has issued its first CDP Wave. They made some interesting choices, including the set of vendors and a focus on B2B CDPs. But it’s a start. You can download a free copy courtesy of Leadspace, which Forrester ranked as a leader.