CDP Institute

Some have feared that audience data would become unavailable once the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect this May. But panic is now being replaced by accommodation and even some optimism that companies can turn GDPR to their advantage. As part of that process, the OpenX advertising exchange has announced its own GDPR compliance and provided a resource center to help others in the industry make the adjustment. If you’re still confused by GDPR, this is a good place to start.

Customer engagement vendor Usermind has raised a $23.5 million Series C funding. Usermind assembles a unified customer profile by reading data directly from source systems, although it does keep a persistent copy of some portions. That puts it right on the border of CDP-land. It uses the data to orchestrate customer journeys.

B2B identity resolution vendor FullContact has acquired B2B data aggregator Mattermark. The deal will add information about four million companies and 20 million people to FullContact’s 15 million company, one billion person database.

The CDP Institute has published a draft list of features to use in categorizing CDP vendors. The classification is an attempt to reduce confusion about what makes a CDP and how CDP vendors differ. Comments are welcome.

There’s already been plenty of comment on Facebook’s plan to refocus the news feed on personal messages. My take is it’s a clever defensive move to relinquish power over public opinion before national governments grab the company to secure that power for themselves. After all, being nationalized is bad for business and Facebook’s only real purpose is to make money. As it should be.

News that Facebook is creating its own video chat device was mostly overshadowed by the news feed change. The most intriguing rumor is the device will include facial recognition software, potentially letting Facebook track every user behavior without any user effort. There’s no reason to think anyone at Facebook even realizes this could be problematic. But let’s not single out Facebook: voice recognition means that every voice-activated device from Apple, Amazon, Google, and others has the same Big Brother potential.

In fact, Facebook may be less dangerous than the others precisely because Facebook is so obvious about what they’re doing.

Artificial intelligence may no longer be a guaranteed attention getter, but it still adds value. Adtech vendor Magnetic has launched an AI-driven media buying platform that it says completely automates campaign execution from audience selection to bidding and optimization. Audiences are drawn from Magnetic’s 260 million consumer profiles and the AI screens for fraud when placing bids. Magnetic says campaigns using the automated system have performed 2 to 10 times better than manual campaigns. Also, media buyers’ time is cut at least by half.

It’s no accident that Magnetic’s description of their automated product includes fraud prevention. Ad fraud is a big problem. This Forrester study, sponsored by AppsFlyer, says mobile ad fraud is especially problematic because of mobile is growing so quickly and audience data is limited. While 92% of respondents said that mobile ad fraud prevention is a high or critical priority, just 19% had systematic fraud prevention in place.

We haven’t heard much yet about fraud in addressable TV ads but you can bet it’s coming.

The National Retail Federation’s big trade show kicked off in New York yesterday. This would usually generate a flood of news but so far it’s more of a trickle. Here’s one item from a CDP vendor: Evergage announced an alliance with in-store tech vendor One Step Retail Solutions and retail marketing agency Sophelle. They’ll use Evergage’s data unification and real-time personalization to gather data from One Step systems and to provide those systems with personalized messages.

Retail-focused CDP AgilOne also made an announcement at NRF. They highlighted enhancements including a new high-speed data query tool, a customer privacy API to comply with GDPR and other requirements, and easier access to real time contextual information by in-store systems and other customer-facing applications.