CDP Institute

Still catching up with last week’s news, InfiniGrow launched an AI-driven marketing planning platform, which creates optional plans across multiple channels. Planning is done at the channel level although the system seems to use individual level in its calculations.

Data breaches happen all the time. But now that Facebook is the poster child for BadTech, someone grabbing 50 million account access tokens was literally front page news in the major media. Nobody knows what, if anything, the hackers did with the tokens. But breathless coverage of the story is arguably more interesting than the event itself.

One of Facebook’s suggestions after their breach was to use two-factor authentication, which uses something like a phone number to confirm a user’s identity when they log in. Alas, Facebook has just been caught using such information without permission to help advertisers target individuals. Facebook said it’s just trying to help: “we use the information people provide to offer a more personalized experience, including showing more relevant ads.”

It would be easy to find more BadTech news about Facebook but you get the picture so let’s change the subject. Cyollaboration platform Slack has acquired email app Astro, which already had a Slack integration. Don’t read this as Slack is admitting email is here to stay: the company says its “goal is to make it as easy as possible to help teams shift conversations to where they would be most productive — in a channel.”

On the bright side – or is it the Dark Side? – of customer tracking, The Advertising ID Consortium is working on standard IDs to help track ad exposures to individuals and devices. Although the mission is to help marketers, the Consortium also reminds anyone listening that “As a result, consumers can expect to have a more meaningful and seamless experience throughout the digital ecosystem with more relevant, personalized messaging from the brands that they value and prefer.” Participants include Criteo, OpenX, PubMatic, Thunder, IgnitionOne, and AdRoll Group.

Decibel also aims to help marketers by improving customer experiences, in its case by creating a single Digital Experience Score based on Web site and app user behaviors such as engagement, navigation, form completion, and frustration. It does some heavy duty analytics to convert the raw data into meaningful information. Decibel has just extended its product to break out the components affecting each visitor, making it easier for companies to identify and fix problems at the individual level.

You were supremely uninterested in yesterday’s news about B2B technographic data, Dear Reader. Let’s see if B2C new is more to your liking. We’ll start with a $4 million Series A funding for DataGrail, which helps companies map where personal data is stored in their systems and show it to customers who ask. This is required by GDPR today and probably other rules tomorrow. It’s a common use case for Customer Data Platforms.

It’s an odd news day, Dear Reader: several sets of related stories but no clear lead. We’ll start with news that B2B contact aggregator ZoomInfo has purchased Datanyze, which identifies the technologies that companies use. The day before, ZoomInfo announced purchase of Israel-based Y Labs, a small start-up of indeterminate nature. ZoomInfo itself was purchased by private equity firm Grant Hill Partners for $240 million in 2017.

Same industry: tech data aggregator HG Data has bought Pivotal iQ, which tracks purchasing activity among communications technology vendors.

What, you don’t care about B2B data? Then here’s some CDP news: CDP and loyalty vendor SessionM has enhanced the loyalty portion of its system with more flexible award structures. Also, retail-oriented CDP Manthan is now using AI to update its customer profiles and individual-level product and offer recommendations.

Salesforce announced Customer 360, which provides a unified view of customer data in its B2C Marketing, Commerce, and Service Clouds. Data will be accessed via API connections without exporting it into a separate CDP-style database. Over at Customer Experience Matrix, David Raab was not impressed.

Customer 360 can also use Saleforce-owned MuleSoft to incorporate data from non-Salesforce sources. MuleSoft today announced its own enhancements, most notably use of machine learning to recommend data mapping and transformations. Other companies do this too – it helps to remove one of the major bottlenecks in the customer data assembly process.