CDP Institute

Location data reveals more than where you are. Factual, which has a proprietary dataset of more than 130 million businesses and points of interest around the world, has released a mobile SDK that looks at things like business operating hours, speed and direction of travel, and device usage patterns to infer the situation of each user. The SDK lets mobile apps use the information to tailor their offers or other actions.

Optimove, which selects customer treatments based on movement between lifecycle stages, has expanded its scope to include acquisitions as well as existing customers. The new feature uses look-alike modeling to assign new Web site visitors to segments and then selects the most appropriate treatment for each segment. The company says that combining acquisition and retention marketing will yield an average 25% lift in conversion rates. If you’re keeping track: Optimove builds a unified, accessible, persistent customer database, making them a Customer Data Platform.

Ah, but how to find the right message for each segment?  Facebook has a new feature that automatically tests different combinations of ad images, videos, and text to find which versions appeal to different segments and placements (News Feed, Instagram, and Audience Network). Specialists like RevJet have been doing this for some time but adoption by Facebook means much broader adoption.

The next step beyond automatically combining ad components is automatically creating them from scratch. Persado has been doing that for years for advertising text. They recently added the ability to create emotional profiles for individual customers and tailor ad language to those profiles. They also announced another $30 million in bank financing, on top of $66 million in previous equity funding. Someone’s emotional state = excited.

Remember when Walmart was the evil empire destroying small businesses across America? Today the $500 billion behemoth has somehow morphed into a spunky underdog fighting Amazon.com ($136 billion revenue). One dimension to the duel is pricing, where Amazon continues to undercut Walmart’s core promise of being cheaper than anyone else. This new study from Profitero finds that Amazon underpriced Walmart in 12 of 13 categories, although the average difference is just 3%. Walmart still beats the prices of other retailers.

Walmart may be on the defensive with prices, but it’s attacking on other fronts. Here’s a piece about its effort to grow its advertising business, leveraging its massive history of online and offline customer purchases. Amazon is growing its advertising revenues as well, although it’s still far behind Facebook and Google. Other major retailers are also using their customer data and Web reach to sell ads.

Amazon, in turn, keeps attacking physical retailers’ advantage in convenience.

Siftery builds a database of which companies use which products, built with information that community members submit about their companies. It has several services that leverage this information to help buyers decide what to purchase based on what similar companies are doing. The latest is addition looks for changes in members’ product stacks and deduces which products most often replace other products. It’s an interesting shortcut but shouldn’t replace the hard work of understanding your requirements and product capabilities.

Then again, why struggle to pick different products when you can buy one suite that does it all?

When it comes to picking ad buying systems, the software is less important than the data it can access. That’s the moral of this Digiday report that Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) is now tied with Google among ad buying agencies. Amazon’s software isn’t especially great but it has exclusive access to Amazon’s data on individual consumers’ shopping history. Low price and self-service options also weigh in Amazon’s favor.

Customer Data Platform vendor Amperity, which launched its product just last month, has closed a $28 million Series B funding. The new round brings total funding to $37 million. Amperity was founded in 2016.

CDP vendor Segment announced Personas, a new feature that lets users define calculations that assign customers to audience segments or create traits such as favorite product category. Calculations draw on unified customer profiles built by Segment; audiences and traits can be automatically shared with 200+ systems through existing Segment connectors. Personas will be rolled out during 2018.