CDP Institute

Speaking of acquisitions, GE Digital recently spent $915 million to buy cloud-based field service technology company ServiceMax, $153 million for Internet of Things data integration specialist Bit Stew, and an undisclosed amount for machine learning expert Wise.io. This is all intended to build its equipment monitoring business but if you don’t think equipment data can be transformed into customer insights, you might want to think again.

Many marketers are confused about the difference between Customer Data Platforms and Data Management Platforms.

I didn’t have space earlier this week to mention Tapad’s announcement that its probabilistic device identities are now available for targeting through LiveRamp. But LiveRamp showed up again in yesterday’s news by acquiring Arbor and Circulate, which both build deterministic device identities and user profiles while selling ads on publisher Web sites. So we see that LiveRamp continues to push hard at expanding its identity resolution business.

Been spending a lot on content, have you? How do you feel to learn that 90% of the engagement goes to just 5% of the items? And that consumption hasn’t increased even though companies are spending 50% more on content creation? Marketing performance measurement vendor Beckon provides these and other sobering facts in a new survey.

Origami Logic gathers a ton of marketing data for performance measurement. But it doesn’t work at the individual customer level, so it’s not a customer data platform. With hair-thin light gray type on a white background, its Web site may set a world record for illegibility. Just saying.

Yes, it’s come to this: robots are watching TV for you. iQ Media, whose business is monitoring media to track coverage for marketing and public relations teams, is using super-smart logo-recognition and spoken word-detection technology to track visual and aural mentions of brands. In real time, no less. Did I mention they have a library of 22 million hours of TV recorded over the past six years?

There’s more than one super-smart computer out there watching a screen. NowDiscover launched its beta earlier this month with a tool that uploads the product list from your Magento ecommerce store, scans YouTube for videos related to your products, classifies those videos and presents them for human review, and, if I’m reading this right, then watches your Web site visitors and recommends the right videos at the right time. Did you notice that we just shifted from analyzing videos to tracking individual customers?

Eight in ten marketers lack the knowledge or resources to create a true Single Customer View, according to a survey by customer data platform vendor BlueVenn. The survey also found that four in ten have more than 20 data sources, three in ten feel their brand has managed to accomplish genuine omni-channel marketing, and one in ten consider the concept of a Single Customer View to bad a “mythical beast” that isn’t practical in the real world.

Lytics a customer data platform with advanced analytics capabilities, has partnered with database and marketing services provide Omeda to offer an integrated solution combining data management and data activation services. It will combine data from multiple sources to build rich customer profiles, provide engagement and content affinity scoring, offer machine-learning based predictions of visitor behavior, create advertising audiences and execute email and Website personalization campaigns.

Personalization vendor Evergage announced Evergage Guardian, which monitors visitor behaviors across Web sites and mobile apps to uncover opportunities and problems in real time. I like the symmetry in this: in addition to recommending things to customers, Evergage turning around and making recommendations to marketers. We don’t classify Evergage as a customer data platform because that’s ancillary to their personalization business, but they do build unified profiles.

And completing our little tour of mobile data news, cross-device identity company Drawbridge announced a 60 day free trial of a dashboard that lets marketers test the impact of different matching algorithms. This is a clever move that gives skeptical marketers a low-risk way to explore Drawbridge’s capabilities. Drawbridge connects more than one billion consumers and five billion devices.

One of the fastest-growing applications for artificial intelligence is extracting business information from the Web. Crayon, founded in 2014, lets clients specify companies to follow and then sends a real-time feed of over 100 types of information including price and message changes, new products, and online reviews. Crayon says it has 42,000 users for its free and paid products. It just raised $3.35 million, bringing total funding to $5.1 million.