CDP Institute

Analyzing data about customer location is quite different from publishing information about store locations. A study from Retail Systems Research finds untapped opportunity in customer location analytics, but also that retailers underestimate consumer privacy concerns. Lots of good insights.

Yesterday’s newsletter looked at marketers who treat consumers poorly. Today, let’s look at marketers getting poor treatment from ad channels. Start with research from image analysis vendor GumGum, which found that 67% of brands have seen at least one brand-unsafe ad placement. Actual consequences are limited: 47% had seen social media criticisms but just 2.3% had lost more than $100,000 in revenue. Nevertheless, nearly half (48%) said they’d adopted a technology to avoid these problems in the past year, bringing the total using such technology to 86%.

More broadly, a study by the TRUTH media agency found 79% of ad buyers are concerned about the level of transparency in programmatic advertising, with 37% citing ad fraud and 23% citing brand safety as specific issues. On the bright side: 70% said they were taking action to improve their confidence.

More good news: ad exchange OpenX reported that more than 50% of top publishers had adopted the ads.txt standard, which prevents fraud by listing companies that are authorized to sell their digital inventory. Ads.txt was developed by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and launched last May, so this is very fast adoption.

Some better news: Google last week announced they’re making it easier for consumers to block retargeting ads. At least, that’s good news for consumers. Marketers might think otherwise.

It goes without saying that building customer trust is essential for any company doing business online. Alas, it also often goes without doing. Email analytics vendor 250ok found that almost 90% of major online retailers don’t take basic steps to protect their customers from phishing attacks (where someone else sends an email claiming to be from the vendor to trick them into revealing personal information). Yikes!

More maltreatment: CRM vendor SuperOffice found that 62% of customers didn’t response to a customer service email. Just 20% answered questions on the first try while only 3% followed up to see if the customer was satisfied with their response.

Customer Data Platform and personalization vendor Evergage has purchased the MyBuys retail offer targeting business from online advertising company Magnetic. MyBuys merged with Magnetic in 2015. Evergage plans to move MyBuys customers onto the Evergage platform. It’s unusual to see one personalization company buy another. Sign of an overcrowded market, perhaps?

Web experience analytics company ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series C, bringing total funding to $62 million. ContentSquare captures individual-level Web site behaviors and supports testing of alternative Web experiences. It works with only anonymous profiles.

More money for analytics: marketing measurement expert Origami Logic has raised $15.2 million in a Series D, making their total $64.5 million. Origami Logic assembles data from all sources into dashboards and visualizations.

Lots of real news today. Start with a $2.4 billion acquisition by SAP of Callidus Software, which offers cloud-based sales performance management and configure-price-quote systems. Readers of a certain age will recall that Callidus bought early B2B marketing automation vendor LeadFormix back in 2012. The deal beefs up SAP’s sales automation products.

Another, much smaller acquisition: artificial intelligence vendor Conversica, which offers a virtual sales assistant for simple conversations, has purchased Intelligens.ai, a Chilean firm specializing in Spanish-language conversations. Interesting on several levels: the importance of training data, expansion into South America, and how far companies will go for AI talent.