CDP Institute

IKEA might be able to offer same day delivery, but to be really convenient they’d need to stuff a little assembly person (or robot) inside the package.

Ecommerce personalization vendor Bluecore just took a $35 million Series C funding, bringing its total to $63 million. Bluecore assembles unified customer profiles and generates targeted messages in real time. It’s not a Customer Data Platform because (so far as we know) they don’t also expose that data for use by other systems. The company had more than 400 clients.

BlueConic is definitely a CDP. They just, announced real-time integration with Acxiom resources for identity resolution, data hygiene, and data enrichment. The deal strengthens BlueConic’s ability to combine offline and online data and to add third party data to information that clients gather directly.

I wish I had something about BlueVenn or Blueshift but we’ll have to settle for people talking themselves blue in the face. Tech marketing agency 10Fold found that 23% of tech marketing departments generate content daily and another 9% do it hourly.  Half are generating at least six times more content than last year.  No word on whether that increased volume has generated better results.

Few people really question the value of artificial intelligence, but it’s still nice to see some validation. BlueWolf’s annual State of Salesforce report found that 77% of Salesforce clients using “augmented intelligence” plan to increase their investment, compared with 20% of companies not using AI. There seems to be other interesting information buried here, but the presentation is so horrendous that it’s almost impossible to find.

Here’s another data point in AI’s favor: digital services agency Kepler found its natural language processing engine improved paid search efficiency by more than 30% over manual methods, while cutting human labor by 90%. Impressively, the system manages search in ten languages including Mandarin. Components of Kepler’s platform support paid search, Facebook, Instagram, display, video, email, call center, sales team CRM, and e-commerce.

And there’s more. Mobile marketing solution provider yellowHEAD reports a 27% increase in return on ad spending from its new machine learning-based product, which identifies campaign opportunities and predicts performance. YellowHEAD looks at the lifetime value generated by its campaigns, not just initial response rates and costs. As it should.

Okay, it’s official: AI-managed databases are a thing. We recently covered Qubole, Datometry and Infoworks. Now Oracle itself has announced the world’s first autonomous database cloud and data warehouse cloud. Lots of self-tuning goodness involved. Your DBAs might actually have to talk to people.

Or maybe those bored DBAs can be redeployed as security managers. A survey from enterprise identity management vendor SailPoint found that that three in five senior IT decision makers expect a data breach in the coming year and one third don’t think they’ll learn about it. A whopping 71% said they’re not equipped to fully protect sensitive data. Maybe it’s just how the survey was written, but no one seemed to feel much urgency about solving the problem.

It would be nice to think that consumers had a better attitude, but a Better Business Bureau survey said that three-quarters of consumers said they had the same or more negative experiences last year vs three years ago.

At the other end of the spectrum we have news that Taboola – which offers those little article links at the bottom of Web sites – has teamed with third party data distributors including Oracle Data Cloud, Neustar, Acxiom and Bombora to provide information about Web site visitors. This lets advertisers target the articles using visitor data as well as on-site behaviors. All entirely legal but not exactly putting consumers in control.

Second party data is held more tightly than third party data, in that companies who provide the data can pick exactly who uses it. Consumers still don’t have direct say, though. Salesforce has just announced announced Data Studio, a platform to simplify second party sharing arrangements.