CDP Institute

Finally there’s e-Spirit, a Web content management system that became an omni-channel “digital experience hub”. They just announced an “intelligent content engine” that creates personalized messages by first building a unified customer database and then generating audience segments and product and content recommendations as inputs.

Amperity, which has been in not-very-quiet stealth mode for over a year, has formally unveiled its “intelligent customer data platform”. As you’d expect, it builds unified customer databases using machine learning and a large-scale distributed data architecture on Microsoft Azure. The big innovation appears to be probabilistic rating of the matches found by its identity resolution engine, so customers take use tighter or looser standards depending on how important it is in a particular situation to be certain that matches are correct. The company raised $9 million in February 2016.

TouchCR also builds unified customer profiles, along with customer scoring and segmentation. It has just unbundled key services including customer data merge and integration, scoring, journey state reporting, and dashboards. TouchCR is focused on ecommerce clients and integrates with all Salesforce.com products.

Having a hard time telling apart Amperity, TouchCR, and dozens of other CDP vendors? So is everyone else. The CDP Institute is working on it – here’s the latest step in our project to make sense of it all.

One of marketing’s grand new frontiers is taking advantage of the location data from Internet-connected devices. A study from Grand View Research finds that the total “location of things” market will grow from $5.6 billion in 2016 to $71.6 billion by 2025, a breakneck pace of 34% per year.  Media and marketing are expected to account for about one-quarter of the market.

Indoor mapping is one of the most intriguing location-related applications. Mappedin helps retailers build maps of their locations and use them to create “digital wayfinding experiences” on mobile apps. They’ve just announced an integration to make their applications available on Apple mobile devices and, not-so-incidentally, provide property owners with data on user behaviors.

Can ad exchange bids provide a useful source of location data? A study from Placed, which captures location data from apps, found that only about 1% of ad exchange bid requests provide out-of-home locations accurate enough to measure in-store traffic. It’s self-serving but nevertheless worth reading for an excellent explanation of the data quality issues.

The folks at Integrate.ai are rather vague on what their start-up will do, beyond applying SaaS-based artificial intelligence to first- and third-party data to optimize customer engagements. But that was enough to attract a second round of $4.6 million seed funding last week, on top of $5 million announced when the company was launched in February. No word on when a product will be released.

Marketers who spend more on measurement get better results, according to a Neustar-sponsored report from Forbes CMO Practice. Alas, they released only an infographic rather than the full report. But even that has useful factoids if you’re arguing to expand your company’s measurement program.

This isn’t exactly news but it’s still interesting to learn that Amazon’s patent on “1-click” ordering expires today. Does it seem they’ve been doing that forever or that they started just yesterday? Bonus question: what will change now that everyone can offer 1-click shopping?

Ad tech company Glispa Global Group has acquired justAd, which sell tools to create interactive ads. Glispa also manages programmatic networks for display and app advertising, as well as offering a Data Management Platform, ad creation tools, and mobile SDK. JustAd is Glispa’s fifth acquisition in the past eighteen months.

Interacting through a screen involves physical effort. Exhausting! Omnichannel marketing automation provider Resulticks has addressed the problem by adding voice interactions to its campaigns. Their example: a smart home device recommends air conditioner maintenance based on local weather forecasts. It doesn’t seem that marketers can build campaigns with voice commands, although I’m sure they’re working on it.