CDP Institute

And there’s more. Mobile marketing solution provider yellowHEAD reports a 27% increase in return on ad spending from its new machine learning-based product, which identifies campaign opportunities and predicts performance. YellowHEAD looks at the lifetime value generated by its campaigns, not just initial response rates and costs. As it should.

Okay, it’s official: AI-managed databases are a thing. We recently covered Qubole, Datometry and Infoworks. Now Oracle itself has announced the world’s first autonomous database cloud and data warehouse cloud. Lots of self-tuning goodness involved. Your DBAs might actually have to talk to people.

Or maybe those bored DBAs can be redeployed as security managers. A survey from enterprise identity management vendor SailPoint found that that three in five senior IT decision makers expect a data breach in the coming year and one third don’t think they’ll learn about it. A whopping 71% said they’re not equipped to fully protect sensitive data. Maybe it’s just how the survey was written, but no one seemed to feel much urgency about solving the problem.

It would be nice to think that consumers had a better attitude, but a Better Business Bureau survey said that three-quarters of consumers said they had the same or more negative experiences last year vs three years ago.

Data security and privacy are much on users’ minds these days, between GDPR, the Equifax breach, and growing concern over what Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others are up to.

At the other end of the spectrum we have news that Taboola – which offers those little article links at the bottom of Web sites – has teamed with third party data distributors including Oracle Data Cloud, Neustar, Acxiom and Bombora to provide information about Web site visitors. This lets advertisers target the articles using visitor data as well as on-site behaviors. All entirely legal but not exactly putting consumers in control.

Second party data is held more tightly than third party data, in that companies who provide the data can pick exactly who uses it. Consumers still don’t have direct say, though. Salesforce has just announced announced Data Studio, a platform to simplify second party sharing arrangements.

Attribution also generates less interest than it should. C3 Metrics just launched an “attribution data cloud”, which includes user-level viewability, cross-device matching, and fraud removal across online and offline media. Viewability and fraud removal are mainly the concerns of media specialists, but the cross-device matching, universal ID to unify online and offline identities, API access and bidirectional CRM connectors should interest anyone who works with customer data.

Completing our tour of neglect is a report from data security vendor Opus and the Ponemon Institue about data security risks of sharing information with third parties. Attention grabbers: 56% of companies have experienced a third party data breach and 57% don’t have an inventory of third parties receiving their sensitive information. Oh, and the average breach costs $7.3 million to fix.

I know what you like and today’s newsletter isn’t it. But I consider these topics important. Let’s start with automated data management – something that should matter to CDP vendors and buyers alike, since it reduces the cost of building and managing a unified, persistent customer database. Datometry, which specializes in this sort of thing, has announced an automated data warehouse schema synthesizer. That makes it easier to move data warehouses to the cloud.

Neilsen has announced plans to purchase multi-touch acquisition vendor Visual IQ. The deal helps Nielsen measure marketing results based on individual-level data.

Google Cloud had purchased Bitium, which provides enterprise identity management. The deal came one day after SAP Hybris purchased Gigya, which also offers identity services. But Bitium is focused largely on employee identities to control access to resources, while Gigya is focused on consumer identities.