CDP Institute

One of the problems with taking humans out of the media buying process is that ad fraud and brand safety problems can go undetected. Programmatic ad platform RhythmOne reports it blocked just over one-third of all potential inventory due to fraud or performance concerns last June – September.  Rates are similar with previous periods but better options are emerging: fraud is lower on mobile app inventory than desktops; private marketplaces offer higher quality options; and ads.txt is helping to prevent unauthorized selling by fraudsters.

Nearly half (45%) of consumers expect their email or social media accounts to be hacked in the coming year, according to a survey by PwC and BAV Group.

Sadly, consumer concerns about security are well founded. The 2017 U.S. State of Cybercrime survey, taken by CSO Magazine, Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Secret Service, and Forcepoint, found that 39% of security managers said the frequency of cybersecurity events has increased and the average number of days before problems are detected rose from 58 in 2015 to 92 in 2017. The average at large enterprises was 138 days – that’s four months for the math-impaired.

And if you don’t have enough to worry about, it turns out your vacuum machine could be spying on you too. Researchers at Check Point, who are paid to try such things, found they could hack into the camera on a Wi-Fi connected LG vacuum robot, despite sophisticated anti-hacking defenses employed by the manufacturer. Their point may be undercut by a video illustrating the hack: while intended to be ominous, it seemed to show the main risk is the world learning whether you have dust bunnies.

Among my many pet peeves are vendor claims to have the first or only product in a market. Today’s news items are important even though they’re not as unique as promised. We’ll start with Panoply, which has just released its “smart cloud data warehouse” from beta. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically enrich, transform, and optimize complex data. That’s really important, since those tasks are major obstacles to customer data unification. So important, in fact, that we also wrote last week about Qubole’s similar-sounding product.

Connecting online advertising to offline sales is another important topic. NinthDecimal has a massive location database and tracks movements of more than 195 million people per month. It has just launched what it calls the “industry’s first website-to-store attribution solution” to measure incremental lift in store visits resulting from online advertising. If that sounds familiar, perhaps you’re remembering AdTheorent’s announcement about ad pricing based on incremental store visits.

Q-nomy caught my eye with the “world’s first app market dedicated to omnichannel customer journey optimization”.

Marketing spending has fallen over-all and martech spending has dropped even more sharply, according to Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey. Marketing fell from 12.1% to 11.3% of annual revenue and martech fell from 27% to 22% of marketing spend. Bad news if true, but remember it’s just a survey.

If marketing spend does fall, one perpetual explanation is lack of measurability. Feel free to add this Cision study to the evidence: they found that 73% of U.S. communications professionals (i.e., public relations staff) “do not have a good sense of whether or not there was any digital or real-world behavior driven from the brand’s content” Interesting implication that “digital” isn’t part of the “real world”.

Less martech spend might mean less need for content, but don’t bet on it. Many of us expect artificial intelligence will eventually build all those highly targeted messages, but Tempesta Media has nearly 20,000 vetted content creators willing to do it the old fashioned way. They’ve just partnered CRM vendor Oomiji, which creates highly refined segments that need lots of specialized content.

DemandGen Report also found ABM users were happy: 74% of respondents to their 2017 ABM Benchmark Survey said programs were either meeting (54%) or exceeding expectations (20%). But they painted a picture of a less mature market: 75% of respondents said they had defined their ABM strategy within the past 12 months and 56% said they were still in the test stage.

Finally, here’s a report from Demandbase and Wakefield Research on agency adoption of ABM.