CDP Institute

And while we’re reporting on vendor acquisitions: personalization vendor Windsor Circle has been bought by OSG, which adds marketing messages to invoices, billing statements, and similar communications. Windsor Circle builds customer profiles using eCommerce data but no one has ever called them a CDP.

If you’re expecting some cutesy Valentine’s Day theme today, you’re reading the wrong newsletter.

That Winterberry report was a relatively long 35 pages, but it’s a greeting card compared with the 177 page behemoth the IAB just published on the 21st Century Brand Economy. Their central point is that brands will interact directly with consumers, removing many barriers that formerly protected market leaders from competition. IAB supports, or maybe undercuts, its argument by noting that non-store sales grew from under 4% of retail in 1992 to 9.4% in 2015. Success will require direct marketing skills, trust-building, smarter ad buys, and lots of data.

Accenture weighed in with its own 78 page epic, a Technology Vision offering five snappily-named trends including Citizen AI, Extended Reality, Data Veracity, Frictionless Business, and Internet of Thinking. They see companies integrating themselves deeply into their customers’ lives, requiring new levels of trust, technology, and, of course, data.

So, you want more vendor news? Okay then. UK-based Customer Data Platform RedEye has added an AI-based predictive modeling module that creates conversion, multi-purchase, churn, subscription and lifetime value models. Scores are easily available to use in RedEye marketing campaigns.

Here’s a two-fer: CDP vendor AgilOne and personalization vendor Monetate have partnered to make AgilOne data easily available to Monetate for personalization. Joint clients will also benefit from AgilOne’s AI-driven insights, which will supplement Monetate’s own AI-driven recommendations.

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.