CDP Institute

Meanwhile, commerce platform Kibo Software is also broadening its scope, in their case by purchasing behavioral personalization vendor Certona. Kibo, which offers solutions for retailers and manufacturers, was itself bought by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in 2015. Kibo made four acquisitions the following year but this is the first since then.

More corporate canoodling: Bridgeline Digital is purchasing OrchestraCMS, the primary asset of bankrupt Stantive Technologies Group, for about $5 million. OrchestraCMS is a native Salesforce AppCloud app. If Bridgeline rings a bell, that’s they purchased SeeVolution’s Web analytics and Celebros site search assets just last week. You do not want to look at Bridgeline’s stock price.

In quick succession, we learn the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering a multi-billion (with a B) fine for privacy violations; the federal Government Accountability Office is recommending tighter privacy regulation, and a British Parliament report has called them “digital gangsters”. That’s gotta hurt. Maybe they won’t take over the world after all.

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.