CDP Institute

More bad news for the duopolists: Apple’s latest Safari update makes it easier to block third party cookies used for cross-site tracking. They’re especially important for Facebook and Google. Decide for yourself whether Apple is being an altruistic protector of consumer privacy or cementing control over its customers by blocking out competitors.

It’s pretty small potatoes when an existing vendor adds a single new feature.

It’s also not very surprising to find that personal data is available for sale!

Here’s a more conventional item: a product launch. The vendor is Spatially, which provides businesses with location-tagged consumer data. They just added the ability to run geo-targeted ad campaigns in Google AdWords and Facebook.

We all know that retailers face massive change, but sometimes don’t recognize how aggressively many are responding. This study from BRP Consulting found that 51% now offer same day delivery, up from just 16% a year ago. About one-quarter have other advanced capabilities such as promotions based on real time events and identifying customers within the store. Lots of other interesting information.

Same day delivery eliminates a big reason to visit physical retail stores. So you might wonder why Walmart just purchased Parcel, a same-day delivery service in New York City. My take: the option keeps customers within the Walmart family, making it harder for online competitors to establish beachhead relationships.

IKEA might be able to offer same day delivery, but to be really convenient they’d need to stuff a little assembly person (or robot) inside the package.

Ecommerce personalization vendor Bluecore just took a $35 million Series C funding, bringing its total to $63 million. Bluecore assembles unified customer profiles and generates targeted messages in real time. It’s not a Customer Data Platform because (so far as we know) they don’t also expose that data for use by other systems. The company had more than 400 clients.

BlueConic is definitely a CDP. They just, announced real-time integration with Acxiom resources for identity resolution, data hygiene, and data enrichment. The deal strengthens BlueConic’s ability to combine offline and online data and to add third party data to information that clients gather directly.

I wish I had something about BlueVenn or Blueshift but we’ll have to settle for people talking themselves blue in the face. Tech marketing agency 10Fold found that 23% of tech marketing departments generate content daily and another 9% do it hourly.  Half are generating at least six times more content than last year.  No word on whether that increased volume has generated better results.

Few people really question the value of artificial intelligence, but it’s still nice to see some validation. BlueWolf’s annual State of Salesforce report found that 77% of Salesforce clients using “augmented intelligence” plan to increase their investment, compared with 20% of companies not using AI. There seems to be other interesting information buried here, but the presentation is so horrendous that it’s almost impossible to find.

Here’s another data point in AI’s favor: digital services agency Kepler found its natural language processing engine improved paid search efficiency by more than 30% over manual methods, while cutting human labor by 90%. Impressively, the system manages search in ten languages including Mandarin. Components of Kepler’s platform support paid search, Facebook, Instagram, display, video, email, call center, sales team CRM, and e-commerce.