CDP Institute

Of course, voice interaction is one tiny corner of the artificial intelligence landscape. The nice people at industry research company Tractica has summarized the big picture, including three macro categories, six technologies, ten key themes, and seven steps to take next. Good stuff.

This cool technology stuff is all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?  The latest massive data breach was reported by Equifax, which said identifying information had been stolen on up to 143 million consumers. Equifax’s response has been criticized as inadequate and, according to TechCrunch, wouldn’t meet standards in the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

GDPR compliance is one of many use cases supported by Customer Data Platforms. Alas, the variety of applications itself causes confusion. This post on the CDP Institute blog takes a stab at defining categories that could clarify things a bit. Nothing is locked down yet, so comment away.

Jivox, which dynamically assembles personalized advertising messages, announced set of APIs that lets creative, workflow, and media execution tools exchange information about ad campaigns, including personalization strategies, creative assets, and targeting models. This will streamline interactions among separate firms and could ultimately make it easier for artificial intelligence systems to coordinate the process. In fact, Mindshare, a WPP-owned global media agency, is already using it to automate programmatic campaign setup through AppNexus.

Pieces on a chess board or deck chairs on the Titanic? Either way, lots of marketing assets are being rearranged. We’ll start with Pitney Bowes’ purchase of Newgistics, which specializes in parcel shipping for online and offline retailers. It’s a natural extension of Pitney Bowes’ postal and customer data technology businesses, and a reminder that grand changes in the retail economy create opportunities for supporting services.

Here’s a more complicated deal: Chinese company BlueFocus Communications Group is contributing agencies owned by its subsidiary BlueFocus International to a new marketing services company that will also incorporate Fluent, a data-driven marketing company owned by Cogint. Separately, Cogint will spin off its other data and analytics operations into a new company expected to be called Red Violet. What’s interesting is the deal values Fluent at $415 million, illustrating the value of data-driven marketing businesses.

Back to simple acquisitions. Digital video programmatic advertising marketplace RhythmOne is acquiring YuMe, which collects audience data to improve targeting of programmatic ads. Price is $185 million. The lesson here is the importance of giving media buyers more extensive audience data, the better to compete with Facebook, Google, and others who already have detailed profiles.

Attribution specialist Visual IQ announced a new Marketing Intelligence Platform that works with individual-level data. The system integrates cross-device identifiers, ad impressions, online and offline interactions to build complete customer profiles, enhances these with audience attributes from third party sources, adds marketing cost information, applies multiple attribution techniques, and can forecast future performance. It also includes marketing mix models, TV attribution, native ad bid management. and integration with external real time bidding platforms. Much of the new technology comes from Visual IQ’s acquition of Refined Labs in October 2016.

Is realistic cross-channel attribution finally becoming possible?

Has it already happened: autonomous cars ordering things for themselves, presumably to be delivered by self-guided drones? Not yet: the headline refers to anti-hacking technology to protect autonomous car guidance systems. Of course, the need to protect cars from hacking is itself a sign of the times. The headline makes more sense in Israel, where GPSdome is based, as a reference to the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

LookBookHQ uses customer data and behaviors to offer continuously updated content recommendations in each situation. It’s a bit tough to explain but pretty cool when you see it. They’ve just raised an $11 million Series B to help spread the word.

You probably know by now that information you reveal in one channel is available pretty much everywhere. So you won’t be concerned that survey compiler datadecisions Group has added a product to target direct mail, email, and Facebook ads at people who say they plan to buy a specific product. Not one bit creepy.