CDP Institute

Sigstr puts marketing messages in employee email signatures.  It sounds just vaguely clever until you learn they dynamically tailor those messages to the recipient. That’s more interesting. They’ve just raised a $5 million Series A to expand their business.

It’s shaping up as a slow news week, but we can always find some gee-whiz technology stories. Here’s a forecast from market research firm Tractica that predicts more than 23,000 customer service robots will be deployed worldwide by 2022. They’re talking about mobile, physical R2D2-type robots, not just chatbots.

One of those little robots might follow you around a grocery store, perhaps second-guessing whether you should buy that bag of chips.

Using weather data to trigger localized marketing seems pretty standard these days, but it’s still amazing if you think about it. PowerChord has just announced campaigns that use weather forecasts to trigger paid search and display ads. PowerChord offers a range of online advertising and marketing programs that help brands drive sales through local channels such as dealers.

Programmatic advertising in virtual reality on mobile apps: Immserv combines more hot technologies than an Ethiopian-Sichuan food truck. No wonder a dozen investors lined up for their $10.5 million Series A.

Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but mobile advertising does have a bit of a fraud problem. Tapcore, which identifies illegal copies of mobile apps, and Airpush, a major mobile advertising platform, have merged to help clean things up. They’ll create a merged SDK to help advertisers battle app piracy.

The Association of National Advertisers also worries about ad fraud and the related issue of adtech complexity. They’ve started a program to measure the costs more precisely. It will draw on the TrustX programmatic trading marketplace, a cooperative venture of thirty premium content publishers.

Hmm, a single API for all-channel personalization? Sounds great. LiftIgniter offers one, and just raised a $6.4 million Series A to promote it. But they apparently use data only from whatever channel they are personalizing, instead of building a unified customer profile. That will limit their effectiveness.

A Customer Data Platform can help build those unified customer profiles. But even a CDP needs to be fed data. That’s where Narrative comes in: it provides a marketplace for data owners to sell their data to whoever needs it. Interesting concept. They’ve just partnered with cross-device identity expert Adbrain, which says it has mapped devices and locations to 90% of the U.S. adult internet population.

Other folks sell data too. For example, Equifax has all sorts of credit and financial information. They’ve just unified their offerings into something called Equifax Data-Driven Marketing. Scope includes data, unification, analytics, targeting, and measurement.

Attribution is a critical investment priority for nearly one-quarter of companies (23.9%) that responded to a survey by the Data & Marketing Association. Nearly two-thirds (62.5%) said it had become more important in the past year. The report also shows a continued shift in funds from offline to online marketing channels…no surprise there.

More surprising, a survey from Televerde finds that 80% of B2B sales professionals feel they and their company marketing teams are either aligned (62%) or very aligned (18%). The apocalypse is near.