CDP Institute

Slightly more substantial: shopper marketing firm Catalina has given the world yet another digital-to-retail attribution solution. Catalina’s special twist is measuring results down to the item level (you’ll recall they collect purchase data from loyalty programs). They connect purchases to media by having marketers apply tracking pixels to their ads, which Catalina links to 390 million devices and their owners.

Further afield: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has spent $103 million to acquire Berlin-based open source data tech vendor Data Artisans. It’s interesting on several levels: Alibaba doing a deal in Europe; Alibaba competing with Amazon in cloud services; and another big deal for open source tech. Plenty for all you sheep to chew on.

Back to surveys. At least this one from email company Yes Marketing is interesting. Turns out that irrelevant product recommendations are the second-most-common reason for not opening email (50%), after too many emails (55%). Over-personalization “creeps me out” (12%) outweighs lack of personalization (11%). In other words, consumer demand personalization is greatly exaggerated – and poor personalization is hurts more than no personalization at all.

Meanwhile, survey company Toluna strutted its stuff to reveal that entertainment is the most common reason people buy new technologies (43%), followed by automating tasks (26%), tracking behavior (23%), sharing on social media (18%) and receiving more personalized ads (12%). That anyone would buy tech to get personalized ads seems surprising, but it’s clearly not a priority for most consumers.

If you suspected that last item came from Jamie, our faithful Department of the Obvious Intern, you’re right. He’s paired it with a study from appliance maker Whirlpool Corporation that discovered most consumers want to spend less time on cooking and laundry and like to save money. They surveyed 2,000 consumers in four global regions to find this out. Jamie is enthralled.

Ah, a normal news day at last. We have an acquisition: Web delivery platform Akamai has purchased customer identity access management vendor Janrain. It’s not a pairing you might have expected but it does make sense: Akamai adds security to Janrain’s log-in processes. Quite relevant to marketers who want better ways to build trust and capture customer identities.

We have omni-channel adtech: MediaMath announced it has combined out-of-home programmatic advertising (purchased via Place Exchange) with other programmatic channels in the same campaign. They say it’s a digital advertising industry first and who has time to check? Either way, it shows that out-of-home is up-to-date.

And we have cross-channel attribution: Cuebiq, which collects location data about individuals, has partnered with TV viewing data collectors Inscape and Gracenote to correlate TV consumption with retail foot traffic. This once would have seemed amazing but now such services are commonplace. No doubt they differ ways too subtle for most of us to grasp.

The News Gods remain on holiday but we can always talk about blockchain. Comcast announced plans for an early 2019 test of its Blockgraph project, which lets addressable TV media companies and advertisers use blockchain-secured encrypted data to target ads without sharing personal data. It doesn’t give any more control to consumers but does limit how widely their information is spread.

On the other hand, Microsoft is testing a project that lets consumers view, control and possibly sell data that others have gathered about them, such as travel history gleaned from wireless highway tolls. It’s called “inverse privacy”. Blockchain isn’t mentioned but surely it’s in there somewhere.

Do you suspect all this talk about blockchain in marketing is overblown? HTF market research estimates the 2017 spend on blockchain in media, advertising and entertainment at a mere $30 million. It does project a 82% annual growth rate, yielding $590 million by 2022. But even that seems low. A look at the report will cost you $2,350.

The News Gods have shown just enough pity to let me avoid writing about more surveys, Dear Reader. We have an honest-to-goodness acquisition: press release service Cision has purchased social media platform Falcon.io, which will help PR people and marketers integrate their publicity and social campaigns. Everyone loves convergence.