CDP Institute

Not sure your kids will sit still for a 33 page Forbes paper? No problem: the creative folks at Deloitte Digital have extracted a nine-page summary from the massive CMO Survey they do with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. CDP aficionados will be pleased to learn that “marketers are finally realizing the consequences of poorly integrated customer information across channels”. More relevant to today’s theme: 68.4% of marketers don’t use analytics data to help make everyday business decisions. Didn’t know we had a theme today, did you?

Maybe CMOs would be more successful if they spent less time answering surveys. Here’s one more, this time by partner marketing specialist WorkSpan. They found that just 11% of marketers are confident their budget is spent effectively. Perhaps hoping to save marketers some time, WorkSpan reported results in a press release without publishing the report itself. And, I was just kidding about CMO surveys: 68% of study respondents held non-CMO titles.

And here’s a $101 million Series C funding from data science platform Dataiku, which serves data scientists and business users alike. A lot of what Dataiku does is actually data preparation – making it either a CDP client or partial competitor. The round is by far Dataiku’s largest; it had raised just under $46 million previously.

Why not make some news of your own? You could win a Marketing Technology Award at a post New York City ceremony next March hosted by the ubiquitous Scott Brinker. The project is run by ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. Entry is free – look here for details.

It looks like I’ll be publishing all week after all, Dear Reader. There’s just enough legitimate news to make it worthwhile. For example, AdTheorent has a new tool that uses AI to generate the best display ad for each individual, combining creative elements such as product shots, logos, colors, backgrounds, messaging and calls-to-action in real time. AdTheorent was already using predictive analytics to decide which consumers to serve ads and when.

Did you know the OASIS standards group is working on a Customer Data Platform standard?  Me neither.  Work began in 2015 under the name Context Server, which became CDP in October 2018. Results are being implemented in the Apache open source Unomi project. See this ApacheCon slide show for an update and visit the OASIS site for more information.

Speaking of open source, Microsoft has launched a Web analytics product, Clarity, with an open source library for Web page instrumentation. The new product will let site owners replay visitor Web sessions, competing with tools like FullStory and VWO. It’s just starting a beta program.

Session replay makes some people worry about privacy, but if you really to raise some hackles, offer to identify otherwise-anonymous Web site visitors.

As expected, there’s no news worthy of your attention today, Dear Reader. But I’ll offer some interesting surveys. Here’s one on connected devices from network technology provider TNS. They found that most (62%) of U.S. adults think such devices boost the quality of life, even thought even more (72%) fell that location data creates privacy and security risks. You won’t be surprised that 25-34 year olds are the most enthusiastic.

A survey by chip technology vendor Arm also found positive attitudes towards tech: 61% said increased automation will make society better while just 22% said they would make things worse. Loss of personal data was the top concern about AI, cited by 85% compared with 63% worrying about machines being unreliable and a still-considerable 57% fearing they would become more intelligent than humans. Reflecting those worries, 67% said they’d prefer AI devices to store data locally and 57% still felt that way even if cloud storage would improve performance.

Again: this SAS study found that 67% of U.S. consumers want the government to do more to protect data privacy. They’re already helping themselves: 77% said they had changed privacy settings, 67% said they are changing or rejecting cookies, 56% had deleted a mobile app and 36% had removed a social media account. The survey didn’t ask whether they’re mad as hell but the answer is clear.

We’ll see how this week goes, Dear Reader. If the news is as slow as expected, we might just shut down early and give you back a few minutes. In the meantime, we have some items left over from last week. Let’s start with an acquisition: software review site G2 Crowd has purchased Siftery, which examines company Web sites to figure out what technologies they’re using. The idea is for Siftery to help companies manage their technology after HG Data helps them buy it.