CDP Institute

Speaking of replaceable: we sometimes wonder why we’re paying Jamie, our Department of the Obvious Intern, to sit and read The New York Times. Then we remember he’s not paid. Jamie tells us that the latest scoop from The Time’s crack tech reporting team is that Internet of Things devices might spy on you. Wow.

Data analysis platform Looker has announced special applications for digital marketing and Web analytics. The applications, now in public beta, provide prebuilt data structures and analytics. Looker combines data from multiple sources and makes it available for analysis and visualization. But it stores the data in a SQL database, making it more limited than most Customer Data Platforms.

Personalization platform Dynamic Yield has added “multi-touch campaigns”, which deliver different sets of messages to different customers across multiple touchpoints. This allows tests such as consistently offering 10% off to one customer group and free shipping to another. It requires identifying customers across channels during each interaction, which many testing systems can’t do. Dynamic Yield works across Web, email, mobile apps, and advertising.

Maybe you’re interested in the state of Customer Experience and maybe you aren’t. But check out Genesys’ CX survey if only for its cool interactive graphics. Lots of fun splits by region, industry, business department, and age group. For example: 27% of customer care professionals think bots won’t reduce customer care headcount but 62% of IT professionals think they will. You can probably win a bar bet by knowing which region is most fond of personalization, assuming you hang out in the right bars.

Who ever thought the words “Adobe” and “fast-moving” would bes used in the same sentence? Yet just four months after finalizing its acquisition of ecommerce platform Magento, Adobe has released its first integrations with Experience Cloud. Magento gains cross-touchpoint shopping experiences, AI-powered personalization, and behavior predictions. Magento also announced other enhancements to its core capabilities.

Digital experience platform Sitecore has purchased Stylelabs, which offers digital asset management, marketing resource management, and product information management capabilities. Sitecore also announced enhancements to its core product, including a Javascript SDK to access its .NET functions, headless content applications, expanded use of AI, and more precise email governance.

Here’s an excellent NTT Data survey on attitudes towards big data. You won’t be surprised that consumers are skeptical: while 65% of business executives said big data will be used to help consumers, just 40% of consumers agreed. The skepticism is justified: 80% of executives said their company gives strong protection to corporate data but just 42% said consumer data is strongly protected. Lots more about what’s creepy and how consumers are protecting themselves.

An uncool name wasn’t the main reason so few people used Google’s social media network Google+ although it probably didn’t help. The company today announced they were shutting down the consumer portion of Google+, although they’ll keep some corporate applications. They also described several new limits on data sharing, mentioned that a security bug exposed data from at least a half million accounts, and look, a squirrel!

What’s in a name? Zaius meets the CDP definition of building and sharing a unified, persistent customer database. But they add marketing automation features that place them beyond the CDP realm. They’ve just announced an integration with ecommerce platform Shopify, which suggests they’re serving clients much smaller than most CDP vendors. Speaking of names: they have an endorsement on their Web site from someone named McGregor Button.

Crimson Hexagon is another cool name but the company is giving it up as a part of a just-announced merger with Brandwatch. Both companies play in the social media monitoring space. The combined firm will add data from other sources as well.

Let’s skip today’s product news, which is all pretty minor. Instead, here’s Reltio, a Master Data Management vendor that also qualifies as a CDP, announcing they’ll support Salesforce Customer 360 and the Open Data Initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and Salesforce. As if they had a choice. I liked how clear they made their real opinion of those approaches: “Common IDs and tight coupling of apps can solve some immediate problems, but in the long run still create new islands of data that ultimately spell trouble for customer 360 initiatives.”

Speaking of honesty, Publishing Executive found that the biggest obstacles to tech adoption are buyers’ time, resources, and budget, not integration or finding systems that fit their needs. That’s a truth not always acknowledged. The survey covered only publishers but other industries are similar. Other interesting data here too.