CDP Institute

Here’s a sign of the times: publishing giant Meredith Corporation, which recently bought Time Inc., is selling its 450-person content marketing agency MXM to Accenture Interactive. Accenture is already among the largest marketing agencies; this just highlights its growth.

Hi, I’m Jamie, resident intern in the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The office is closed today so it’s up to me to put out the newsletter. Fortunately, I’ve accumulated lots of obvious research. Here’s a study from sales management software company Altify that finds companies with effective sales processes have bigger deals and shorter sales cycles. They also found that buyers trust independent experts more than the selling company’s CEO. Yep, that’s obvious.

Similarly, the International Institute for Analysis found that companies with better analytics have better financial performance, reputation, brand value, and innovation. This obvious conclusion is backed by a super-sophisticated methodology combining “quantitative surveys, organizational modeling, and a software-driven maturity scoring model”. The study was sponsored by collaborative data science platform Dataiku.

Consumer behavior is an especially rich source of obvious results. GlobalWebIndex tells us that 94% of internet users now own a smartphone, 16-24-year olds are the most active mobile users, and Android is the dominant operating system globally. Pew Research found that 26% of Americans are online almost constantly. My personal favorite is a HRC Retail Advisory report that 95% of consumers want to be left alone while shopping. These people make my job so easy. Obviously.

Facebook is phasing out its arrangement to let marketers target ads based on individual data from third party providers like Acxiom and Experian.

Data access is hot, so I’ll report on yet another scheme for consumers to sell their own data directly.

Worried you won’t be able to target individuals based on their data? Relax; that future isn’t here yet and, in fact, the options are growing. TiVo, whose cute little boxes quietly track TV viewing in more than 2 million households, just announced it will share the information with Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, allowing advertisers to build custom segments based on TV viewing habits and even to retarget TV ads at specific households.

It’s beginning to look like access to customer data is as valuable as access to the customers themselves. Springbot, which provides marketing automation to small ecommerce companies, has set up a co-op to let its clients pool anonymous customer profiles and send campaigns to look-alikes of their own customer lists. Springbot sends the campaigns, so retailers only get information about responders. Springbot collects its clients’ data through integration siwth Big Commerce, Magento, and Shopify.

B2B predictive analytics vendor 6sense assembles its own data by scanning public and private sources for buying signals. It just added a campaign execution engine to deliver advertising and email messages to the opportunities it uncovers. This is a significant extension for 6sense, which previously fed scored leads and segments to external marketing and sales systems for execution. As marketing execution systems like Salesforce and Adobe expand their AI features, 6sense’s data becomes a more important differentiator.

GDPR is the granddaddy of all data access stories.

Also at the Adobe Summit, data integration vendor SnapLogic announced connectors to load data into the Adobe Cloud Platform using Experience Data Models. Adobe’s own press release mentions similar connectors from Informatica and TMMData.

Adobe’s master press release also casually mentioned general availability of their Device Co-op, originally announced two years ago. The Co-op lets Adobe Analytics Cloud customers pool deterministic device matches to create a shared master set of matches. In a newly privacy-conscious world, perhaps a quiet announcement was best. But if other sources of cross-device matches are limited by GDPR and other changes, Adobe’s large customer base could make its Co-op an important alternative. Details here on how the Co-op works.