CDP Institute

So, is it game over for retailers? Should they turn their stores into vast couch showrooms and sell popcorn as customers purchase online? The seriously smart folks at Retail Systems Research don’t think so: they’ve found that successful retailers feel employees should take the initiative in engaging with customers, not just wait for technology to tell them what to do. And, RSR argues employers should invest in quality workers – even raising wages! – to make this possible. That’s crazy talk.

B2B data aggregator Leadspace has added $21 million Series C funding, bringing total raise to $56 million. Leadspace assembles data from public and private sources, combines it with a client’s own data, and uses artificial intelligence to create lead scores and alerts.

B2B marketing budgets for earned media – publicity and social channels – are growing faster than paid and owned media budgets, according to this study that Demand Gen Report prepared for public relations services company Cision. The survey found companies already spend 24% of their budgets on earned media, nearly as much as owned (32%) and paid (25%). Biggest obstacles were connecting with influencers and measuring return on investment.

Earned media budgets may indeed be growing fastest, but the bulk of the spend is on social media, not conventional public relations. Sagefrog’s eleventh annual B2B Marketing Mix Report found social media tied with email as the most implemented marketing tactic (79%), while conventional public relations ranked ninth at 29%. Read this to see how your marketing mix compares with the Jones’.

A happy reader of this newsletter told me recently that what he likes is knowing when nothing important has happened. Ouch! But fair enough, and today is one of those days. So let’s talk about a clever Trustwave study that calculated the different values placed on personal data by security professionals, insurers, regulators, and cyber criminals. Turns out, the market value of your data to criminals is insultingly low. No information on the values assigned by marketers or the consumers themselves.

Of course, topic #1 in privacy circles is still GDPR. This Forrester study, sponsored by Evidon, found that 58% of big companies expect to spend more than $1 million every year to stay in compliance with GDPR and ePrivacy rules. In the finest lemonade-from-lemons tradition, Forrester argues compliance will create new business opportunities. And all those people whose homes were flooded in Houston now get the new kitchen of their dreams!

Snark aside, I think Forrester is right. Accenture agrees: they found that 44% of consumers are frustrated by lack of personalization but 49% worry about privacy when they subscribe to data-driven services. More than half (58%) would switch to a company that personalizes without compromising trust.

Shifting to the bigger picture: Target just spent a half-billion dollars to buy same-day delivery service Shipt, strengthening Target’s position in the on-going battle with Amazon for online customers. Why isn’t there a TV soap opera about this?

You’ve made it clear, Dear Reader, that CDP vendor news is your favorite. So here’s an announcement that mostly-mobile CDP mParticle has added a native SDK for Xbox. Like Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man”, it’s less important for what it is than what it signifies: the ever-expanding range of customer behaviors that marketers can capture.

Swrve could also be called a mobile CDP, although they prefer “customer interaction platform”. They can now calculate and expose customer intent during real time interactions, making it easier for marketers consider intent when selecting customer messages. Maybe it’s not fair to call Swrve a mobile CDP: it can gather data from digital and offline channels, internal systems and third party sources, and it can push messages to streaming digital media, Web browsers, SMS, and email as well as mobile apps.

Here’s a crazy thought: people might actually start paying attention to reality. The deep thinkers at Accenture just listed “physical fights back” as one of seven major trends that will impact business in the coming year. But digital isn’t entirely dead: Accenture forecasts a blending of digital and physical experience.

Maybe we can name a new category of “realtech”. Certainly there’s money to be had. Today’s news includes three funding announcements related to physical experiences: $15 million for Bizzabo, which provides cloud-based event management software; $20 million for OTA Insight, which captures real-time information used to optimize pricing in the hospitality industry; and $30 million for Dreamscape Immersive, which will install virtual reality entertainment centers at shopping malls, movie theaters and other locations.