CDP Institute

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Personal identity vendor LiveRamp has added an API to integrate its AbiliTec offline identity resolution platform with external systems. Its press release features quotes from CDPs BlueConic and RedPoint Global as sample users. This highlights an often-misunderstood fact: many CDPs rely on external technology for identity resolution, in part because identity resolution often uses external data with connections not available within a company’s own data.

Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP announced an “Open Data Initiative” including a public, extensible data model and shared data lake on Microsoft Azure. The project is in early stages, with engineers from the three companies still working to reconcile their individual models. This Adobe blog post suggests that Adobe has already published schemas to help share data among its own systems. For an assessment of what this means for CDPs, see this post on Customer Experience Matrix.

CDP mParticle has added an integration to upload mobile app events to Facebook’s advertising platform in real time. This program will save marketers the effort of developing custom data feeds into Facebook. Good to know that Facebook’s other problems haven’t stopped it from finding ways to capture more data.