CDP Institute

Most of the news from NRF seemed to be about in-store systems – not especially surprising, but where were artificial intelligence or unified online/offline experience? Instead we have point of sale marketing specialist Ecrebo announcing a new platform to deliver targeted offers at checkout via printed receipts, digital receipts, or customer-facing screens. Ecrebo bases its targeting on a central database that combines transactions and other data from all channels, so it does look a bit like a CDP. Not that I’m obsessed.

“New Study Reveals Socially Conscious Brands Have An Edge With Consumers” reads the headline from social media management vendor Sprout Social.

And again: this study by retail behavior tracking vendor Euclid found that brands taking policy positions is clearly a bad idea. Seventy-eight percent of consumers said companies should avoid public statements that take a political stance, while just 22% felt companies have an obligation to do so. Just 16% said they buy from a company regardless of what it says or does. The study also looks at other factors related to store purchases.

So if brands shouldn’t take policy positions, how about hiring influencers who probably have strong opinions of their own? Well, there’s certainly the risk of an influencer going off the rails but most followers presumably agree with them. This Nielsen study doesn’t address risk but did find that influencer marketing is better than TV commercials at generating engagement and improving brand metrics. TV is still best at building awareness.

Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has been integrated with Swrve, a digital customer interaction engine. Lots of jargon in that sentence. In plainer English: Segment will make data from all sources available to Swrve, which will use it in marketing campaigns (mostly mobile, which is Swrve’s strength). Does that help?

Ecommerce platform cleverbridge, which apparently can’t afford a capital C, has announced new Integration Services to connect with marketing automation, CRM, and other systems. The services are based on Scribe Software’s integration platform, which synchronizes data across partner systems. This doesn’t make cleverbridge a Customer Data Platform: it’s just passing data from system to system, not building a unified, persistent customer database.

You know who else isn’t a CDP? Sprinklr. They’ve added a “Social DMP” to the social advertising module of their social media management system. Their language is distinctly CDP-ish: “Quickly unify unstructured CRM lists, offline data, and streaming data across multiple databases and any social channel”. But look closer and you see they’re creating audience segments, not tracking individuals. That’s what distinguishes DMPs from CDPs. Kudos to Sprinklr for getting the name right.

The Invoca study found that complicated voice interactions still require humans. Many artificial intelligence vendors are working to change that. Here we have magia.ai, which just launched what it calls “the first truly autonomous-retail platform” to create “human-like selling interactions” by voice or text. The key is to understand free-form natural language and adjust system accordingly. They tested it on wine recommendations, which must have been fun. Maybe they’ve crossed the uncanny Napa valley.

Still not convinced all this matters? A study reported in this Marketing Land article found that Amazon Echo owners spend $400 more per year than run-of-the-mill Amazon Prime subscribers. (I couldn’t find the study itself.) And here’s a look from Wired at Amazon’s world domination lab, a.k.a. Alexa Voice Services. Get ready for voice-enabled lightbulbs.

Voice-based devices get plenty of attention but I still don’t think people recognize how entirely they will change the world in general (the walls will literally be listening) and marketing in particular (no more visual advertising). This report from Invoca covers some of the territory, finding that 20% of searches are already done by voice, 61% of people will listen to voice ads, and 73% of voice assistant owners have already bought something through it. Can you hear me now?

It’s easy for marketers to see marketing as the center of everything. Today let’s look at some other perspectives. We’ll start with this survey of attendees at a recent TechEmergence conference on applied artificial intelligence. Most were business founders and technical employees. When asked about current and future use of AI, they ranked marketingbehind analytics, customer experience, and process automation. It did beat cybersecurity, human resources, finance, robotics, and vehicles.

Next up is a survey by Retail Info Systems of senior retail executives. Top strategy for customer engagement and loyalty was in-store personalization. Integrating online and offline capabilities ranked third and “holistic customer-centricity” was a lowly number eight. Similarly, customer segmentation and targeting was the most-cited challenge while omnichannel engagement ranked fourth and consolidating application and data silos was ninth. In other words: most retailers are still wrestling with basic marketing technology.