CDP Institute

CMOs are also looking to a future where they get more data directly from their customers, according to the Duke Fuqua CMO Survey. Seventy percent expected to use more online customer data in the next two years compared with just 30% expecting to use more third party data. If you’re never seen this report, take a peek: it’s a 73-page trove of data on many topics. And if you want more on the future of third party data, check out this recent post on Customer Experience Matrix.

The U.S. is about to start Labor Day weekend, which is a good or bad time to discuss workers being replaced by machines. We’re talking about human copywriters, which UK-based Phrasee says it can beat 98% of the time with an AI system that ingests the performance of a year’s worth of brand copy, figures out what works, and writes email subject lines, Facebook and Instagram ads, and push messages. They just raised $4 million which they’ll use to add staff and expand in the U.S. market.

Marketing departments may need fewer employees but they still want human customers. SheerID helps to ensure they’re reaching the right people by verifying eligibility for gated offers. They do this by asking personal questions on offer forms and checking the answers against “hundreds of authoritative data sources”. Most popular segments are military, college students and teachers; they’ve just added seniors, businesses, employees, and students in more than 100 countries. Creepy, cool, or a bit of both?

Today’s theme might be ambivalence. Just in case, let’s finish another idea that’s either great or terrible: location-based video ads on automobile windows. This from Grabb-It, whose demonstration video shows people fascinated when they see a window ad for (apparently) the first time. How quickly will it become annoying?

Looking for CDP vendor evaluations? Have $6,200 to spend? Fiercely independent Real Story Group just published their 156-page opus, covering 18 vendors with more to come. The price includes a year of updates plus supporting materials. One-on-one advisory services are extra.

Latest in our regrettably endless series on bad privacy behavior: the Wall Street Journal reports that Oath, the Verizon-owned online unit that includes Yahoo and AOL, is reading customers’ emails to help target advertising. Actually, Yahoo has been doing it for ten years and said so in the fine print of user agreements. They try to read only “commercial” emails to understand what you’re buying, how much you travel, whether you’re an active investor, and so on. Does that make you feel better?

One eternal question about privacy is whether consumers really care. Password protection vendor LastPass found that consumers still engage in terribly risky behaviors, like using the same password for multiple accounts, even though they know better. In fact, just 55% said they’d change a password after an account had been hacked. But let’s not be negative: you can read this as an uplifting tale of unquenchable human optimism in the face harsh reality.

It’s official: we’ve reached Peak Facebook. BuzzSumo and Buffer examined 43 million posts on the top 20,000 Facebook business pages and found total interactions fell from 23 billion in second quarter 2017 to 12.8 billion in second quarter 2018. That’s 45% fewer interactions. Meanwhile, posts rose from 6.8 million to 8.1 million, so interactions per post fell even more sharply. The study also finds that five posts per day is the optimal frequency. Makes me tired just writing about it.

Social isn’t dead yet.

Here’s a fiendish little test, Dear Reader. I know you’ll read even trivial news about the likes of Salesforce and Adobe, but does that curiosity extend to serious-but-unflashy companies like Informatica? They’ve just announced a slew of enhancements to their master data management, cloud data integration, and data privacy products. It’s all directly relevant to customer data management, so you should be interested. Then again, it’s Informatica.

Salesforce has quietly raised $317.2 million in new equity funding, according to SEC documents. The company made no public announcement. Presumably it is refilling cash reserves depleted by the $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition in March and the $800 million Datorama acquisition in July.

In what would literally be a rounding error for Salesforce, PebblePost has raised a $25 million Series C. PebblePost continuously monitors visitor behaviors on client Web sites, uses its own data to link visitor devices to postal addresses, and sends behavior-based direct mail within a day or so. That’s pretty impressive, actually.