CDP Institute

Perhaps Google won’t be our new overlords, either. They’ve abandoned a plan to modify the Chrome browser in a way that would have crippled competing ad blockers and other tools. The change followed a study by ad blocking vendor Ghostery that disproved Google’s claim that ad blockers slow down page loads. In fact, they speed them up. Honest mistake by Google? You decide.

Since we’re uncharacteristically cheery today, let’s ignore the hype and remember blockchain’s potential for privacy and ad fraud prevention. That makes it good news to find more than 290 blockchain-based marketing systems. NeverStopMarketing, which helps blockchain start-ups, has inevitably packaged the research in a logo-scape, which shows the most crowded categories are ad supply chain, ecommerce, and personal data management.

In-app programmatic advertising is substantially more prone to fraud and wasted impressions than Web-based ads. This according to a study from Lucidity, which uses a blockchain-based technique to verify ad metrics. While 96% of Web impressions were confirmed by all members of the ad supply chain, just 65% of in-app ads were. Non-confirmed impressions are likely to be fraudulent or wasted. Confirmation rates improved substantially when placements were optimized to avoid discrepancies, which implies (but doesn’t prove) that performance improved as well.

Lucidity is clearly barking up the right tree: this Forrester study for PubMatic found that nearly one-quarter of ads budgets are now spent on mobile in-app ads, most purchased programmatically. And, sure enough, ad fraud and viewability measurement top the list of concerns. They buy anyway because they like the high engagement and targetability.

Shifting to a simpler type of fraud, we have a report that high theft rates were a major factor in Walmart’s decision to end its test of cashierless checkout. Customers frequently placed items in their shopping carts without scanning them. Unlike Walmart, Amazon’s cashierless Go stores don’t rely on customer scans to determine what they pay for.

Database marketing agency Merkle has launched an “entry-level data management offering” that integrates multiple data sources and makes the results available for analysis. The company stresses that Rapid Audience Layer falls short of a full-scale customer database. It does data hygiene and identity resolution to build a unified customer view but is limited to structured inputs and analytical reporting.

Bridgeline Digital, which offers a suite of cloud-based Web content management, ecommerce, and marketing automation systems, has acquired Celebros semantic ecommerce site search technology and SeeVolution Web analytics. The deal adds new depth to Bridgeline’s already-broad set of capabilities.

Finally, relationship intelligence vendor Affinity has raised a $26.5 million Series B. Affinity scans data such as emails, contact lists, and calendar events to measure relationships and identify opportunities. Yes, there’s tons of artificial intelligence under the hood.

IBM has its own improvements to announce, notably options to deploy several Watson AI services in private cloud environments. That matters because many companies still don’t trust public cloud with their data. Coincidentally, Lexalytics also just made all of its AI-based text analysis tools available for on-premises and private cloud deployment. Lexalytics reports that its on-premises business has grown twice as fast as its public cloud offering.

Enough fancy technology. Small businesses need simpler solutions. Constant Contact is addressing that world with a new Marketing Advisor program that will include actual human contact (well, 30 minutes on the phone each month) to help small business marketers figure out what to do and then do it.

Adobe has released a variety of enhancements to its Experience Manager, notably AI-based tagging of videos for actions, attributes and objects. Other improvements make it easier to use Experience Manager assets in Adobe creative tools including Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign and to embed interactive content in customer communications. Nothing earth-shattering but steady improvement, Adobe-style.

Mark Twain didn’t originate the phrase “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, which in fact was a play on an older phrase “simple liars, damned liars, and experts”. Ouch. In any event, let’s look today at two directly contradictory surveys. First, RSA Security found that just 17% of consumers view personalized advertising as ethical. Indeed, only 48% see any ethical ways for companies to use their data.