CDP Institute

Adobe yesterday announced a unified customer profile that includes data from outside the Adobe Cloud products. Data is mapped using Experience Data Models (an open source data language created by Adobe) and available in real time to any system that speaks that language. This related blog post from Adobe says the unified data is loaded into a persistent Adobe Cloud Platform database on Microsoft Azure and that identities are matched across systems. It supports GDPR requirements too. Impressive and very much in line with the CDP approach.

As the GDPR effective date looms ever closer, we see companies taking a more nuanced view of compliance.

And the Facebook backlash continues. IPhoto digitization app vendor ScanMyPhotos saw fit not just to advise people to delete their photos from Facebook, but to issue a press release about the suggestion. Maybe it’s just a way to get attention by piggybacking on the news, but they also presumably feel it’s useful to be seen as pro-privacy.

ScanMyPhotos isn’t alone in taking a position on public issues: OnBrand Magazine found that 79% of marketing decision-makers are including social and cultural issues in their 2018 strategies and 36% are excited to explore brand activism.

Mobile-oriented CDP mParticle has added the ability to display the complete record of an individual customer, including attributes and behaviors. It’s the sort of thing a sales person or customer service agent might use. It shows that mParticle, like other CDPs, is extending beyond data management.

Are you trapped in a bizarre alternate universe where this newsletter is your only source of information?

Hopefully you don’t need convincing that marketers should be honest about how they use customer data. But if you do need a little push, here’s a Harvard Business Review study that found recommendations including an explanation of the data used (“based on your clicks on our site” or “based on what you’ve shared with us”) had higher click and spending rates than recommendations that didn’t describe their basis. Bonus: the paper includes some sound advice for using personal data wisely.

Lots of research shows that IT leaders give low priority to marketing technology. But an Experian survey of CIOs suggests they at least do recognize the importance of customer data: it was the most common focus for data management efforts (77%), even beating out product data (61%) and financial data (57%). Almost half (44%) saw potential to monetize high quality data in the future. Other interesting insights here.

If customer data is the foundation of good marketing, then data quality is the foundation of good customer data. Data transformation vendor Paxata found that just 15% of IT executives said their companies had deployed a mature data quality approach, which they define as using things like data lakes, public cloud, and profiling. Another 40% had developed one but not deployed it. The IT organization was in charge of data quality at the vast majority of companies, with just 12% saying line of business managers had primary responsibility.

Putting things in a broader perspective, a survey from digital transformation consultants PointSource concluded that many companies are jumping into new technologies they don’t understand and without fixing their existing systems first.  CDP vendors take note: more than half said building a complete customer view involves accessing more systems than they’d like.

Lots of CDP and near-CDP news today. Let’s start with a “strategic initiative” between CDP RedPoint Global and enterprise preference manager PossibleNOW to cooperate on meeting some requirements of the GDPR privacy regulations. PossibleNOW provides the use interface and consent management while RedPoint connects with corporate data.

Next up is Segment, which we classify as a CDP but mostly moves data between systems. Given the cool $6.5 billion that Salesforce paid yesterday for data connector MuleSoft, Segment would probably prefer to list itself in that category. In any case, they just added the ability to move data into cloud data warehouse Snowflake, which will store it and process analytical queries from tools like Tableau and Looker.