CDP Institute

AI vendors are careful to claim their tools will augment not replace human analysts, but who are they kidding?

You knew this was coming: location data is now so easily available that someone is giving it away. Location analytics vendor Placed is giving free access to visitor traffic data for 1,900 major businesses, including giant chains such as Walmart, McDonalds, and Starbucks. They hope to spur demand by educating the market.

Want to use that local traffic data to target local advertising on YouTube? It takes a separate campaign for each market – potentially hundreds of thousands. Yuck! But local marketing tech vendor Netsertive has solved the problem, automatically creating the campaigns and localizing the creative. Huzzah! But you’ll have to wait a bit longer: commercial release is a few months away.

Did you wake up this morning wondering what impact artificial intelligence has already had ad agencies and marketers? AI-based marketing platform vendor Albert took a survey to find out. Bottom line: brands are less impressed than agencies but nearly everyone has seen some benefit. Download for details.

Customer success technology vendor Totango announced a $9 million Series D funding, bringing its total to $36.3 million. Systems like Totango connect data from all sources to build a complete customer view, but they’re not CDPs unless they also expose the raw details to other systems.

Customer service isn’t the same thing as customer success.  Customer service vendor Aspect found that use of voice channels has decreased compared with online channels, even though customers prefer voice to everything except in-person interactions. Presumably the reason is that companies are pushing online options. This may be why consumers rated choice of channel as more important than personalized treatments. Aspect smells a business opportunity: 75% of consumers said they’d pay more for exceptional service.

Customer experience (CX) includes service, support, marketing, operations, and pretty much everything else. CX agency Verndale found the biggest challenges cited by CX professionals were lack of real-time data and operationalizing CX insights. Personalization was 9th from the top. Yet 92% said personalization is crucial to good CX and 51% said their organizations can’t deliver the personalization their customers want. No simple answers but much food for thought.

#BoycottNRA hold-outs Google, Apple, and FedEx also sell home monitoring devices and make deliveries. Just saying.  Meanwhile, Facebook has dodged the NRA bullet and announced a $3 million investment in “Local News Subscription Accelerator”. The project will help local news organizations recover some of the business they’ve lost in recent years to, um, Facebook. Would it be rude to note that Facebook earned $109 per day in 2017?

Perhaps more hopeful for local media: start-up Relevnt is expanding its “location-based mobile network”, which lets local publishers and organizations host interest-based communities which are exposed via mobile app to subscribers. Contributors’ content appears within immediately via RSS feeds and contributors earn advertising revenue. Technically, each community is a Web domain owned by the local publisher and the communities are aggregated by the mobile app. So far, the only way to get the app is through the Apple Store so this isn’t entirely free-range content grazing.

Amazon has spent a reported $1billion-plus to acquire video doorbell maker Ring, whose technology could help drop packages inside of shoppers’ homes. Now we know why Amazon has rejected calls to #BoycottNRA: it wants to sell Ring to home security-obsessed NRA members. Or at least prevent them from taking potshots at Amazon couriers.

Personalization vendor SmarterHQ has released an identity resolution framework to track customers across time, channels and devices. They’ve always gathered data from multiple sources so presumably what’s new is improved matching methods. Maybe more interesting is that they consider identity resolution a feature worth promoting. File it under the same heading as Tapad repositioning itself as a CDP.

Is identity resolution over-hyped? After all, how many data sources could a company have? Well, 1,020 applications was the average in a MuleSoft survey of IT decision makers at large enterprises. Just 29% were connected despite integration absorbing 22% of IT budgets. Before you jump off a bridge, remember the study covered everything, not just marketing systems.