CDP Institute

The milk of human kindness might contain a drop of sympathy for Facebook, now everyone’s favorite villain. But Facebook continues to earn its bad reputation. The latest news is that, after earning some privacy props last March by blocking use of third party data for ad targeting, they’re allowing Kenshoo to target Facebook ads using such data from Experian.  Presumably other partners will be allowed to do the same. Because, you know, Facebook needs every penny it can get.

Facebook-owned Instagram did just announce they would remove “inauthentic” likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third party apps to create them.  But those were always in violation of Facebook rules, so this just reminds us that Facebook should have blocked them from the start. If you think no one was harmed, bear in mind that advertisers base spending decisions on those measures.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the official start of the holiday shopping season. So let’s look at shopping behavior. We’ll start with a survey from real estate firm JLL Retail, which finds that just 31% of consumers expect to do most of their shopping in physical stores, although another 15% will buy online and pick up at a retailer.  Just over half will make at least one purchase from their phone, up from 22% last year.

More than half (62%) of online shoppers will overlook past security breaches for a great Cyber Monday deal, according to a survey from cyber security vendor DomainTools. Just 40% said they’d buy on such a site without a deal. Only 51% said they think about breaches when they shop online. If you find that upsetting, you really don’t want to hear about a CompTIA survey which found just 25% of shoppers usually consider privacy and security practices when they decide whether to use an online service.

A significant minority of shoppers care less about deals than the corporate values of their merchants. Publicity agency MWWPR christened this group “CorpSumers” last year and estimates they are 35% of the U.S. population.  A recent survey found that 75% of the group say they’ll select holiday gifts based on whether they feel the brand or retailer has values similar to their own.  You could also argue this means that three-quarters of shoppers don’t care about corporate values. For an extended discussion, see this blog post at Customer Experience Matrix.

It’s shaping up as a slow news week, Dear Reader. I’ll do my best. Let’s start with news that sales enablement platform InsideSales has launched “AI-driven email prospecting”. Two features seem to make it special: ability to track multi-recipient opens, forwards, clicks, and attachment downloads and ability to embed videos, product demonstrations, and attachments. It’s not entirely clear how AI plays into this but I guess it’s neat anyway.

More clearly AI-driven is MomentumBi, which combines structured and unstructured data from Momentum’s own experiential ad programs (sports, music and entertainment sponsorships) with sales, media, and behavioral data from other sources. AI provides predictive analytics, performance monitoring, and ROI measurement.

Finally, ad blocking recovery vendor Blockthrough has purchased adblocking analytics vendor Pagefair. Blockthrough serves a “safe, light, and un-intrusive ad experience” to adblock users who have opted into “Acceptable Ads”, recovering about 70% of the revenue that would otherwise be lost. This is at least vaguely interesting, right Dear Reader? Hello?

Three Customer Data Platform vendors were ranked in the Deloitte’s 2018 Technology Fast 500, which reports growth from 2014 to 2017: Segment (number 125, 912% growth); Tealium (number 293 with 279% growth, and Reltio (number 294 with 278% growth). Only Tealium repeated from the previous year, which also included Datorama and Signal.

How much value to consumers really place on their data?

Ad optimization vendor Thunder Experience Cloud conducted a much more elaborate research project, analyzing billions of ad impressions to compare cookie- and device-based identification with people-based identification from LiveRamp. They found that cookie- and device-based methods report twice as many unique individuals as people-based methods. In other words, people-based measurement shows that the ads reached half as many different people and each person received twice as many impressions as cookie- and device-based measurement reported. The gap grew larger as campaigns got bigger.

Here’s a rare treat, Dear Reader: three items about Customer Data Platforms. We’ll start with news that B2B CDP Leadspace has launched a native Salesforce integration making Leadspace’s contact data, intent signals, and predictive modeling scores available directly within the Salesforce CRM interface.