CDP Institute

Or maybe marketers are their own worst enemies. This AdExchanger piece gleefully describes how Tylenol is using a mix of data signals to identify customers while they’re engaging in specific activities like exercise or staying late at the office and then making offers that show the advertiser knows where they are and what they’ve been doing. It’s along the lines of “feeling sore after that workout? Here’s a map to the nearest place you can buy Tylenol.” Nothing creepy about that.

It’s been a slow news week, so I’m glad to have something concrete: Hearst announced yesterday it is buying the content business of Rodale, publisher of health and wellness books and magazines.

The Rodale sale confirms the obvious struggles of the publishing industry. A recent eMarketer estimate highlights the fundamental problem: people spend just 24 minutes per day with print media, compared with nearly six hours with digital media, four hours with TV, an hour and a half with radio, and 21 minutes with everything else. That’s just over twelve hours total, although some of those hours include time spent consuming two media at once. Total media time is growing very slowly but the mix continues to shift towards digital. Duh.

More from our Department of the Obvious: ad spend follows media time.

Plenty of surveys, including this one from Euclid, show that retail shoppers ultimately care more about price than experience. But long-term brand relationships are something else. Incentive program provider Blackhawk Network found that consumers rank customer experience, convenience and payment process far above price as reasons they remain loyal how to a brand. How far? Good customer experience was cited by 94% while low price was cited by just 57%.

But maybe experience isn’t enough? Heresy! Yet a fascinating report on “brand relevance” by the marketing consultancy Prophet found that consumers ranked Apple, Google, and Amazon as most relevant to their lives, while social networks Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat didn’t even make the top 50. The difference, according to Prophet, is the social networks don’t connect emotionally with their customers.

More heretical still: the brand’s image matters less than the image of the brand’s customers. So argues research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, which has just introduced AffinID Score, a way to measure how strongly consumers identify with their image of a brand’s consumer. “Strategic brands don’t win on price: they win on tribe,” says the research firm’s head of consumer psychology.

Let’s go with visuals. ViralGains offers video advertising that changes as users move through the buying journey and asks users for feedback about what they’re shown, product interests, and brand sentiment. It’s an interesting if complicated concept. They’ve raised $28.7 million including $13 million last month.

And here’s one straight out of Minority Report: imageSurge changes the ads behind a storefront window based on preferences defined in a nearby user’s mobile app. No iris scanning is involved, so far as we know.

Decisions, decisions. Should we talk today about artificial intelligence or visual marketing? We can do both this item about Adhark, whose Ava platform uses AI to score the “visual resonance” of images, based on its understanding of the visual preferences of marketing audiences. This apparently represents a pivot for Adhark, which last year introduced a now-vanished product to recommend social media activities.

Truth be told, I have no news for you today. But I do have interesting studies about personalization. First is a marketer survey from Sailthru. You can almost hear the teeth grind as they report 75% of marketers think segmentation and personalization are the same thing and 65% believe email response rate is a critical success measure. Even more frustrating: while 91% of respondents personalize their emails, just 44% personalize their Web site and only one quarter personalize mobile Web, social media, or mobile apps. Worth a look.

Next we have the customer perspective. Salesforce surveyed B2B and B2C buyers and found that business buyers have significantly higher expectations about interactive and personalized experiences. Less surprising: Millennials and GenXers are more attuned to personalization than troglodytes Baby Boomers. But convenience is still king: while 52%of respondents are likely to abandon brands that don’t personalize their communications, 74% would switch because of a difficult purchase process.