CDP Institute

At least everyone trusts Amazon, right? Well, CPC Strategy did find that 53% of shoppers are more comfortable buying unfamiliar brands on Amazon than anywhere else. But 70% are at least moderately concerned they’d end up with a counterfeit product on Amazon and almost 80% don’t fully trust Amazon reviews. Other interesting information on use of voice-enabled devices, how many look past the first search page, and checking prices against non-Amazon sites.

SessionM is the latest CDP to announce GDPR compliance features. They’ve added tools for customer service agents to respond to consumer requests to view, remove, and halt processing of their data. The features leverage SessionM’s connections with other company systems that house the data.

Gannett announced agreement to purchase Wordstream, a system that helps small businesses self-manage paid search campaigns. Price is $130 million in cash plus some revenue-based contingencies. Wordstream complements Gannett’s other small business marketing services, ReachLocal and SweetIQ. If the connection between martech and Gannett’s newspaper business isn’t obvious, bear in mind that ads from local businesses were a mainstay of newspaper revenue in days of yore.

Sticking with small business marketing, eRelevance has added a lead follow-up service. eRelevance runs marketing campaigns for its clients, rather than selling tools to do it for themselves. Their 1,200 clients are concentrated in the cosmetic surgery industry but they have larger ambitions.

The debate goes on: do consumers care more about privacy or personalization? In a survey by marketing analytics agency Adlucent, 96% of consumers said they want brands to be more transparent about data collection. But behavior tells a different story: 81% have shared their email with a brand in exchange for discounts and willingness to share data has more than doubled in the past two years. Actions speak louder than words.

Also betting that consumer data will remain a viable business is Acxiom, which just added a self-service data marketplace and expanded coverage to Brazil, the Netherlands, and Italy. Acxiom stresses that their data is “ethically sourced” and “compliant”, which is smart: rules like GDPR are causing a flight to quality among marketers who worry about accept data from less trusted sources.

Also pressing ahead with data as a product is Citilabs, which has added hour-by-hour U.S. pedestrian traffic to its data on vehicles and mass transit. The data is sourced from mobile devices and estimates the paths of individuals but is, presumably, anonymized. If the U.S. adopts more stringent consent requirements– which it hasn’t – then firms like Citilabs may find it much harder to gather even anonymized information.

We thought these results were pretty predictable, so we shared them with our Department of the Obvious intern, Jamie. He said they didn’t meet his standards and offered an example of what does: a Pet Sitters International survey that found pet owners like pet-friendly workplaces. Jamie knows his stuff.

Retail analytics provider Euclid offers yet another survey showing that Millennials shop differently from their elders. You knew that, but did you know Millennials care much less about checkout time, return policy and product availability? That’s probably because, as the survey also shows, they’re more likely to order online and use the store as a pickup point. More here about attitudes towards store staff, marketing messages, social media, and so on.

How good a job are retailers doing at giving shoppers what they want? Consultancy FitForCommerce didn’t write “meh” but that pretty much sums it up. Their Omnichannel Retail Index rated 120 retailers against 250 categories across Web, mobile, and in-store channels. The average company scored an unimpressive 58%, up just 2 points from the year before. Even the top ten scored only 68% to 78%. The index measures basics like Buy Online/Pick Up In-store (41% compliance), not advanced offerings like augmented reality.

Content marketing vendor LookBookHQ has expanded its product to select content based on long-term impact on buyer behavior, ingesting data from CRM and marketing automation systems to make this possible. Reflecting a fundamental shift in its business, the company has renamed itself PathFactory.

People-based ad targeting company Viant has publicly launched its data lake, which applies Viant’s personal identity information to ad server logs to give analysts with a more complete view of ad results. As this Ad Exchanger article explains with unusual clarity, the data lake is not a Customer Data Platform because it’s basically a jumble of random data that data scientists can dive into as they please.