CDP Institute

CDP Lattice Engines announced updates to its Atlas platform, most notably including expanded predictive modeling for customer spend and lifetime value. They also improved integration with ad channels and Microsoft Dynamics.

Here’s an impressively detailed study from Litmus on market share of email service providers, broken out by region, industry, company size, and more. Spoiler alert: there are some segments that Salesforce doesn’t dominate.

Bonobo is a conversational AI start-up that extracts customer insights from email, chat, video, and other interactions. No one has claimed they’re a CDP. But they did just get bought by Salesforce in a deal that one source valued at $50 million for the 20 person company.

SAP yesterday joined the parade of enterprise software vendors who announce plans to launch a CDP without revealing a schedule or details. The goal they described – “to ingest all customer attributes to create a unified profile, including experiential, operational events and activity, behavioural, consent and first-party profile, and demographic data” and share these in real time with SAP and third party applications – sounds like a real CDP. We’ll see what they deliver.

Meanwhile, B2B CDP Leadspace, whose product actually exists, launched a consolidated end-user interface for data management, analysis, and segmentation. The functions had previously been spread across configuration files and administrator applications.

We reported last week that many companies won’t be ready in time for the California Consumer Privacy Act, so it seems only fair to add that consent management vendor PossibleNow has launched a CCPA compliance module. More good news for procrastinators: the tech industry is still trying to weaken the law, although time may be running out.

If you care about your own privacy, you may not be thrilled that while you’re listening to Spotify, Spotify is listening back. But, yup, they’ve just started testing ads that ask listeners if they want to hear more and then wait for a response. They immediately turn off your microphone if you don’t accept the offer. I could add something sarcastic but why bother?

You knew your smart speaker had a microphone, but what about that treadmill at the gym? Equipment maker Life Fitness has launched an ad network on its devices, complete with programmatic inventory sold through Vistar Media. So far it doesn’t seem the advertising is targeted at individuals but surely that comes next. Not possible, you scoff? Remember that treadmills already have biometric sensors and Internet connections.

Sometimes the good guys fight back and win. Trustwave’s 2019 Global Security Report found that median time to detect and contain a data breach dropped from 93 days in 2017 to 41 days in 2018. Incidents related to Point of Sales systems went down sharply as merchants made wider use of chip cards. But there’s plenty of work remaining: Trustwave found at least one vulnerability in every application it examined; the media was 15 vulnerabilities of which 9% were high risk or critical.

There’s progress against ad fraud, too. White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers estimate that losses to fraud have dropped 11%, from $6.5 billion in 2017 to $5.8 billion in 2019. This despite a 25% increase in spend. They conclude that, for the first time, more than half of fraud attempts are detected and stopped. Lots of interesting details on fraud methods and rates by device and media.

This report from Forbes Insights and Treasure Data shows that personalization leaders are winning, too: it finds that 54% of personalization leaders exceeded their revenue targets compared with just 15% of followers. Much more here on what leaders do differently and how to follow in their footsteps.

One of these things is not like the other: data quality vendor Validity is buying email deliverability specialist Return Path. Validity, backed by private equity investors Silversmith Capital Partners, bought email verification platform BriteVerify last June, which makes the Return Path acquisition seem a bit more logical. The company describes its goal as providing comprehensive technology solutions to target, contact, and engage customers at scale.