CDP Institute

And if you want Internet-quality evidence that big tech is aiming for total social control, check out this 2016 video from Google. They say it’s just a thought experiment. But that’s what you’d expect them to say.

CDP vendor Optimove has acquired email dynamic content technology DynamicMail from native advertising vendor PowerInBox. The technology can update email content when an email is opened. Optimove says it sent more than 3 billion emails last year.

Did someone mention email? Nearly half (47%) of respondents to a survey from GetResponse and SmartInsights rated email effectiveness as good or excellent, considerably ahead of any other channel. Yet just 17% do anything more than basic segmentation, 60% don’t test anything, and 53% do no segmentation at all. So there’s great room for improvement.

More bad news: when CRM vendor SuperOffice signed up anonymously to 1,000 B2B email lists, 59% of the companies sent nothing within 90 days. Other worst practices: 8% lacked an unsubscribe link, 9% sent emails after an unsubscribe attempt and 18% were not mobile-friendly.

CDP vendor Segment has released its previously-announced Personas feature, which builds unified, real-time customer profiles including computed values and makes them available to external systems via exports and API access. Segment had previously loaded, stored, and shared customer data but hadn’t automatically created unified profiles.

Here’s another hat in the GDPR ring: SAP’ has launched a trio of Customer Data Cloud from Gigya solutions, including identity, consent, and profile managers. SAP bought the Gigya identity management system last September for $350 million.

In a move that seems to be somewhat GDPR related, Lithium announced it is shutting down its Klout social media influence scoring platform. The main reason is that Klout is no longer relevant to Lithiuum’s social media management business, although GDPR’s consent requirements may have hastened things a bit.

Today is Tealium’s turn to announce GDPR enhancements. They’ve extended their already-extensive privacy and consent management tools with multi-language support, more customization, and consent logging.

If GDPR has you thinking about trust, then ponder this: digital verification platform SheerID found that 24% of Americans had redeemed an exclusive offer they weren’t entitled to but 80% said they’d lose trust in a brand that permitted it to happen. And 56% worry that brands reuse information gathered to confirm their identity without their consent.

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.

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.