CDP Institute

And what’s sexier than blockchain, eh? I can think of several things, but no matter. Here’s news that smart product platform EVRYTHNG has pawned its vowels to create Blockchain Integration Hub, which adds blockchain-enabled features to consumer products. They’ve partnered with three blockchain solution providers to enable functions like supply chain tracing, product authentication, and consumer rewards programs.

Scalability problems threaten blockchain’s future, according to Condusiv Technologies. Bitcoin processes three to four transactions per second while Visa handles more than 56,000. Here’s another report with similar results. Condusiv sells technology to speed database performance.

Ternio says it has a blockchain that runs more than one million transactions per second. They have an independent audit to prove it but no commercial product. That will start to change in July when they begin trials of a blockchain-based programmatic ad exchange.

Since we’re on the topic, let’s finish with a blockchain-based loyalty protocol from a company called Loyela. It lets merchants reward consumers with transferable tokens. Still in the pilot stage and an initial coin offering is planned for September.

The venerable Data & Marketing Association (DMA) has been purchased by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Founded in 1917 as the Direct Mail Marketing Association, the DMA has struggled to adopt to the digital world. Its combination with ANA (itself founded in 1910) nicely symbolizes the merger of mainstream advertising and direct marketing techniques.

The transition from direct mail to digital may be old news, but change continues within the digital world as well. Chartbeat reports that Facebook has lost its standing as the number one source of mobile Web site visits. Total traffic is flat but direct traffic and Google Search are now the top referrers. Facebook’s decision to prioritize personal over commercial content is the likely cause; Google has also made changes to increase its share.

Peering into the future, users choices about which sites to visit will be replaced by AI systems that decide for us. AI vendor Neura offers a glimpse of that world by tracking location with mobile and Internet of Things devices and letting marketers subscribe to “moments” such as “arrived at office”. Anonymized, of course. They’ve just added “True Personas” which uses location history to assign people to categories like “avid runner”, “hard worker” or “late sleeper”. Sign me up! Or maybe they already did.

Finally, PayPal has purchased e-commerce recommendation engine Jetlore for an undisclosed sum. Jetlore analyzes product descriptions, individual behavior histories, and context to make very precise recommendations. It joins PayPal’s Marketing Solutions group, which has tools to help merchants analyze their customers and offer customized purchase incentives. Didn’t know they did that, did you? Jetlore had raised $10.6 million.

Lots of fun product news today. First we have the official launch of conDati, which assembles marketing data from multiple sources and uses it for reports, visualization, and forecasting. conDati ingests data from advertising, Web analytics, email, social, and marketing automation systems but seems to work at the level of campaigns, not individual customers. They raised a $4.7 million Series A earlier this month.

Next is a $100 million Series D from Signifyd, which offers guaranteed fraud detection to e-commerce merchants. They judge orders based on individual-level information ranging from device fingerprints and IP geo-location to social graphs and public records to cross-merchant blacklists, drawing on experiences of more than 10,000 clients. The “guaranteed” part is they pay the merchant if an approved order results in a credit card chargeback. Total funding is now $186 million.

Let’s follow up today on stories we’ve covered earlier. Remember that mini-trend of data quality scoring services? LiveRamp has announced its own scoring initiative, focused more on quality than lawful consent. Its first partner will be Lucid, which will check data sources against Lucid’s panel of survey respondents. Irony alert: quality measures are becoming available just as the entire notion of buying lists is under attack for privacy reasons.

Ramifications of GDPR continue to play out. Several U.S. publishers have blocked access to their sites from within the EU. Washington Post has given visitors a forced choice between free access with data sharing and paid access without. It’s not clear this is permitted under GDPR but we’ll soon find out. We also have a separate story that German publisher Axel Springer has released a free, open source consent management tool, providing a publisher-friendly alternative to the one from Google.