CDP Institute

You knew this was coming: a blockchain-based GDPR solution. Sure enough, it’s called GDPR Edge and was built by tech services company IntraEdge using Intel’s SGX secure processing technology. It runs on Microsoft Azure and is being sold by professional services firm BDO USA.

We’ll start with news that Google will integrate with the consent framework proposed by Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab. Or not – suspicions among publishers run high, according to Digiday. As you may recall, the IAB wants Web sites to pop up a list of partners that visitors consent to receiving their data. Publishers didn’t find this very appealing in the first place but it would probably work well for well known and relatively trusted brand like Google.

Confusion about GDPR opens some interesting opportunities. Here’s an announcement from something calling itself the European Center for GDPR Certification, which has launched a “Consumer Privacy Trust Seal”. They are definitely not a government agency and state clearly that “our function is not to certify businesses”. They do offer Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum versions of the seal, which makes very little sense if you think about it.

Visual analytics vendor Arcadia Data is also jumping on the GDPR bandwagon. You might find the connection tenuous but they do have data security and governance features that could help with GDPR compliance. David Meerman Scott calls this “newsjacking”. Many firms are doing it.

Adobe has acquired ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion cash. Adobe competitors Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM already have ecommerce products. Magento is stronger in the mid-market than Adobe Experience Cloud, so this may give them an opportunity to expand in that direction.

Part of Adobe’s plan for Magento is to embed its Sensei AI technology. Oracle and Microsoft made their own AI-related acquisitions recently. Oracle bought Datascience.com, a self-service workbench for data science projects. Microsoft bought Semantic Machines, experts in conversational AI.

And one more acquisition: retail data giant dunnhumby bought Aptaris, an enterprise promotion management platform. It illustrates the trend towards integration of customer data management with data activation. You like trends, right?

Woke up this morning eager to read surveys about customer service, you did not. But it’s still intriguing that poor service costs U.S. $75 billion per year in lost customer value, according to NewVoiceMedia. Here’s more: 86% of consumers would be more loyal if they made a positive emotional connection with a customer service agent, but just 30% said this has happened in the past year. Download now so you can amaze your colleagues at lunch.

Doubtful that emotional connection is what consumers crave most? You should be: CCW Digital found that having to repeat information when transferring between channels is the biggest complaint that agents hear, followed by inaccurate information, product issues, and long wait times. Agents’ own top complaint was unintegrated systems. But there’s hope: helping systems talk to each other was number one on managers’ project list.

NTT Data asked consumers directly about their top service frustrations and got quite different results from CCW: multiple transfers (12%) ranked far behind long wait times (43%), inability to reach a real person (20%) and uninformed agents (15%). Go figure. If you’re thinking automation will reduce wait times, consider this: 94% of consumers prefer a live agent, mostly because virtual agents often fail to resolve their problems. NTT does see change on the way as virtual agents get better.

Mobile advertising is hot: mobile accounted for 57% all digital ad revenue in 2017, according to a study from Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Mobile grew at 36% while all of digital grew 21% to reach $88 billion. Spend on mobile video alone was $6.2 billion, also more than half the video total of $11.9 billion.

All that growth makes mobile adtech (mobtech?) a good business to be in. Moloco, which provides infrastructure to run ads on mobile apps, just raised an $11 million Series B.