CDP Institute

If a chatbot with a Russian accent asked for your personal information, think twice before responding.

Alterian is one of the grizzled old timers of the martech world, founded 20 years ago as a PC-based campaign management engine. They’re probably horrified to see that mentioned, since they’ve recently rebuilt their technology. But it’s relevant because the firm’s deep experience shows in the sophistication of its approach to customer management. They’ve just released “adaptive email”, which is superficially just run-of-the-mill open-time email rendering, but draws on real-time audience segmentation and integrated campaigns to make the updated messages highly relevant to recipients.

Kasasa (formerly BancVue) also traces its roots back more than a decade, although it too uses modern technology.

Australia-based PI.Exchange is a new company but they’re selling an old idea: consumers should control access to their own data and charge for its use. It hasn’t worked yet but maybe its time has come, especially outside the U.S. where new privacy regulations may make current data gathering practices less effective. Their product is a mobile app that’s just entering global beta on iOS.

SAP Hybris has purchased customer identity management vendor Gigya. TechCrunch reported the price was $350 million. Gigya lets consumers register and then manage their information centrally. This becomes increasingly important as GDPR and similar regulations outside the U.S. give consumers more legal power over how their data is used. As our friends at Equifax have recently demonstrated, consumers within the U.S. have pretty much no data rights whatsoever.

Influencer marketing platform IZEA announced it is now using artificial intelligence to vet members of its influencer network. Aligning nicely with the current mood, it positions this as helping to ensure brand safety by protecting marketers from associating with undesirable partners. But it also casually mentions the new system has replaced many of the human workers who previously did the vetting. That’s probably the bigger news.

I thought this next item was also about computers replacing people, since it touts an AI-based startup that predictsWebsite conversion performance without bothering to actually launch the Website. But it turns out that WEVO achieves its miracle by posting images of page designs and asking people their opinion. How quaint.

HubSpot announced its purchase of easy-to-use chatbot builder Motion AI, the firm’s third AI acquisition this year after Kemvi (intelligence extraction) and Evolve App (dating advice…yes, really). The inbound marketing company also announced that marketing technology uber-guru Scott Brinker will be joining as Vice President of Platform Ecosystem, where he will encourage partners to build products for the HubSpot platform. Related: Brinker’s old firm, ion interactive, was just purchased by ScribbleLive.

Personal information is second only to political opinions on the list of things consumers don’t want to hear from brands, according to a study from social advocacy platform Bambu. Responding to questions is the most appreciated behavior. Other insights include gaps between channels used by companies and the channels preferred by consumers. Worth a look.

Not much, when you come right down to it. But marketing services agency Direct Services Inc. has nonetheless launched GDPRtoons, which illustrates key GDPR issues in ways they hope will amuse you. Hey, if that’s what it takes.

The CDPI office is closed today so we’ve prescheduled this newsletter.

It seems that automated creative management is pretty darn popular. Thunder creates, targets, and optimizes personalized display and social ads. They recently bought Adacus, which does AI-based multi-touch attribution, cross-device identity matching, natural language processing for contextual personalization, product recommendations, and creative asset recommendations based on past performance.