CDP Institute

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?

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

Less impressive is news that a data breach at T-Mobile has exposed personal data on 2.3 million customers, including names, Zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, and account numbers. You’ll recall that T-Mobile generated positive news recently by promising that customer services calls would be answered by real people. Sic transit gloria mundi, amirite?

Endless reports about online privacy and security issues seem to be having an effect on user behavior. Pew Research Center finds that more than half of U.S. teens are trying to cut back usage of social media (57%), video games (58%) and mobile phones (52%). They worry about their parents too: 51% of teens say a parent or caregiver has been distracted by their own phone when trying to converse with them. Plenty more in this vein.

In fact, those crazy kids aren’t as glued to their smartphones as everyone assumes. A global survey of college students by Ad Age Studio 30 and UNiDAYS found 94% own a laptop, 32% watch streaming video on a conventional TV, and a whopping 77% read printed books. More than half (58%) don’t trust Facebook with their personal data and 78% are selective in sharing location with apps. But they’re not cave-people: 80% get news from social media compared with just 13% from print.