CDP Institute

More on mobile: app monetization and marketing company ironSource has launched “4D Interactive Ads”, which let users make “choose your own adventure”-style choices within an advertisement. Choices determine what’s shown next and are recorded by the advertiser, making this a clever way to capture customer information in a format that doesn’t usually allow that.

We seem to have a “customer behavior” theme this week. I don’t know why but let’s go with it. A study from marketing services consultancy Lavidge finds that tech buyers rely most on colleagues and friends, search engines, and vendor Web sites as data sources during product discovery, while paying less attention to case studies, industry reports, blogs, and advertising in general. No prizes for guessing that cold call telemarketing is the least favorite of all.

The Lavidge survey covered managers in many departments. Engineers are a different breed altogether. True to stereotype, this survey from IEEE GlobalSpec and TREW marketing finds engineers’ favorite information sources are just-the-facts case studies, ebooks, and white papers. Speaking of stereotypes, do engineers lack social skills? I’d never say that, but the survey found 64% of engineers get information from Web research while 13% ask their colleagues. In the Lavidge study, 52% cited colleagues and 34% preferred Web sites. Just the facts.

But really effective marketing is cross-channel anyway, right? A survey from cross-channel personalization vendor Braze (formerly AppBoy), found that mobile app customers who received only email messages showed a 45% increase in engagement (vs customers sent no messages), but customers who received email, push and in-app messages showed a 543% increase. (Okay, this item doesn’t really relate to the previous two. I do the best I can.)

IOTA is a distributed ledger (blockchain) system with no transaction fees. If that’s not enough to get you excited, how about this: they’ve just launched a pilot version of a data marketplace that will let owners sell data streams, mostly from Internet of Things devices. Whoa Nelly, eh? In theory, people could sell personal data streams too. The “no transaction fee” part of IOTA makes it all possible, since otherwise the transaction fees would make micropayments for data impractical.

If you just can’t wait to sell your personal data, the good folks at Dabbl have already opened a “trustworthy attention marketplace” that pays consumers for interacting with brand advertising. As Dabbl points out, it gives consumers “something smart and satisfying to do in their downtime” on their smartphone. No wasted time talking to Mom or seeing what Sean had for lunch.

Is there anyone left who’d rather keep their personal data private? Yes, but a minority according to an Oracle survey of 15,000 consumers. They found 29% felt offers based on social media data are “creepy”, while 50% would be attracted to personalized offers based on loyalty data, purchase data, and real-time browsing behavior. Other things they found creepy: delivery drones (26%), automatic grocery replenishment (33%), and robot assistance in a dressing room (39%).

Sometimes what companies do is less interesting than how they choose to present it. For example, Jumpshot tracks consumer behavior with a global panel of 100 million devices. They’ve chosen to describe that as a way to “unlock walled-garden data” so marketers can connect ad exposures to behaviors inside walled garden domains like Amazon and Google. They’re also positioning themselves as a campaign optimization solution, another hot topic. Two trends for the price of one.

Along the same lines: automated machine learning vendor DataRobot chose to headline its latest product enhancements as “human-interpretable AI”. They’ve noticed that people want AI systems to explain for their decisions, something that doesn’t come naturally.  If you’re really paranoid, you’ll wonder whether AI will give true explanations or just whatever it learns is most likely to get its decisions accepted.

Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.

Fabled magazine publisher Time Inc. is being bought by slightly-less-fabled publisher Meredith Corporation for $2.8 billion cash. The $18.50 share price is a 46% premium over the stock’s recent level but well under the $25.95 all-time high in 2015. Meredith’s investment is supported by $650 million from the arch-conservative Koch brothers, who promise no involvement in editorial decisions. Sure.

Time Inc. owns some digital properties, including online advertising and identity aggregator Viant.