CDP Institute

Snark aside, I think Forrester is right. Accenture agrees: they found that 44% of consumers are frustrated by lack of personalization but 49% worry about privacy when they subscribe to data-driven services. More than half (58%) would switch to a company that personalizes without compromising trust.

You’ve made it clear, Dear Reader, that CDP vendor news is your favorite. So here’s an announcement that mostly-mobile CDP mParticle has added a native SDK for Xbox. Like Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man”, it’s less important for what it is than what it signifies: the ever-expanding range of customer behaviors that marketers can capture.

Swrve could also be called a mobile CDP, although they prefer “customer interaction platform”. They can now calculate and expose customer intent during real time interactions, making it easier for marketers consider intent when selecting customer messages. Maybe it’s not fair to call Swrve a mobile CDP: it can gather data from digital and offline channels, internal systems and third party sources, and it can push messages to streaming digital media, Web browsers, SMS, and email as well as mobile apps.

Shifting to the bigger picture: Target just spent a half-billion dollars to buy same-day delivery service Shipt, strengthening Target’s position in the on-going battle with Amazon for online customers. Why isn’t there a TV soap opera about this?

Here’s a crazy thought: people might actually start paying attention to reality. The deep thinkers at Accenture just listed “physical fights back” as one of seven major trends that will impact business in the coming year. But digital isn’t entirely dead: Accenture forecasts a blending of digital and physical experience.

Maybe we can name a new category of “realtech”. Certainly there’s money to be had. Today’s news includes three funding announcements related to physical experiences: $15 million for Bizzabo, which provides cloud-based event management software; $20 million for OTA Insight, which captures real-time information used to optimize pricing in the hospitality industry; and $30 million for Dreamscape Immersive, which will install virtual reality entertainment centers at shopping malls, movie theaters and other locations.

Location data from mobile devices may be the most important tool connector between digital and physical experiences. Arrivalist captures information from more than 120 million devices, including ads they’ve displayed and where they’ve physically been. It combines these to estimate the impact of advertising on store traffic. They just released a 3.0 version which includes cross-device tracking of individuals and multi-touch attribution.

Here’s some product news: do-it-yourself mobile app creation vendor Swiftic (formerly Como and, before that, Conduit Mobile) has launched a version to help social media influencers monetize their audiences. Swiftic’s core market is small businesses, which pay roughly $50 per month for apps that integrate a variety of services including loyalty programs, appointments, coupons, push notifications, and deliveries. They have over 20,000 customers.

Sticking with mobile: mobile marketing platform Leanplum has added Campaign Composer, which lets users build multi-channel, event-triggered campaign flows. Although the focus is tailoring in-app experience, messages can also be delivered via mobile push, Web push, and email. Leanplum can also import data from CRM and other channels to create a full-fledged customer profile.

You probably don’t need convincing that mobile is important, although it’s always fun to see surveys like this one, which found that people are more willing to give up wifi than sex and 7% have combined them by checking their smartphone during sex.

Just how much of your Web behavior is actually tracked by data aggregators? Well, Google and its affiliates alone track visitor identities on nearly two-thirds (64.4%) of worldwide Web browsing, according to a study by anti-tracking vendor Ghostery. Facebook trailed with trackers for a mere 28.8% of all page visits. Ghostery found 77.4% of pages had at least one tracker while more than 15% of pages had ten or more.

Maybe you trust Google to act in your interests. Maybe you don’t know they’ve blocked YouTube from Amazon devices for competitive reasons. Or that Amazon won’t sell Google’s Nest products and just recently released a Prime Video app for the Google Play Store. There’s a reason they call these companies walled gardens: and in case you’re unclear, it’s you the consumer they’re keeping inside their walls.