CDP Institute

Using AI to generate insights and recommendations is a hot trend right now.  One example: Engagement Labs has added predictive analytics to measure the impact on sales of different social influence metrics and a simulator to show the sales results of possible changes. Second example: Unmetric has launched an artificial-intelligence-powered system that monitors competitive behavior on social media and identifies what worked best.

Closer to home, networking organization Spiceworks found that 26% of B2B tech marketers expect to look for a new job in the next twelve months. Millennials were most likely to be planning a switch. Further reinforcing everyone’s favorite stereotypes, Millennials were most skilled at social media and least skilled at writing, GenX marketers were best at data analysis, and Baby Boomers were strongest at email and influencer marketing.

None of you read the studies we offered yesterday on consumer trends. Let’s see if you’re more interested in what marketers are thinking. We’ll start with this a poll from media agency Newbase. They compared marketers’ technology priorities in 2016 and 2017. Mobile devices topped the list in both years. Interest grew the most in voice assistants and artificial intelligence, and dropped the most in wearables, Internet of Things, and m-commerce. Remember Apple Watch?

Next we have a survey of digital marketing managers by Marin Software. Most interesting to me was wide plans to adopt advanced search advertising features, including display of local business information (43%), remarketing lists (42%), targeting of known individuals (31%), and estimates ad-driven store traffic (19%). Less than 5% of the respondents were giving top priority to new technologies including voice search and virtual reality.

Swrve loads data from mobile apps and uses it to drive messaging, run marketing campaigns, and feed other systems. It can import data from non-mobile sources, making it a proper Customer Data Platform, although that’s not its focus. The system can run email campaigns, which are delivered through integrations with marketing automation and email platforms. It has just enhanced its integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to allow greater personalization, launch customer journeys, use dynamic email templates, and more.

Snowflake Computing offers a cloud-based data warehouse. They’ve just announced a “Data Sharehouse™”, which is an awesome name if nothing else. But the product sounds interesting too: it makes it easy to share data with outside organizations or – sometimes even harder – between departments or divisions of the same organization. Key features include real-time access without data movement, tight control over data distribution, and both structured and semi-structured data storage.

On the off chance that you have time to pore through a 136 page report, I’ll nominate this really interesting study from Reuters on the current state of news consumption.

The Data & Marketing Association (DMA) has formed Structured Innovation Identity Council to work on cross-channel identity and attribution issues. Council members are vendors and brand marketers including Acxiom, Conversant, Experian, FCB/SIX, LiveRamp, IBM, Infogroup, MediaMath, Morgan Digital Ventures, Moxie, Oracle Data Cloud, Publishers Clearing House, TD Ameritrade, United States Postal Service, and 4INFO. The group is developing educational resources and maybe more.

Personalization vendor Qubit – which also builds an accessible unified customer database and there qualifies as a Customer Data Platform – has released a study of tests on more than two billion user journeys. Its over-all conclusion was that methods based on customer, product or business data have greater impact than cosmetic changes such as colors and location of buttons. Also, targeted personalization works better than untargeted tactics. It’s science.

Speaking of research: a survey by integrated marketing agency Rakuten found that 33% of consumers use an ad blocker and 45% will abandon a Web site because of a bad experience. Popups and preroll video ads were most annoying, while coupons and emails were most useful. Consumers want better ad personalization too. Worth a look.

Customer Data Platform vendor mParticle has launched a new partner certification program, identifying firms that are qualified to leverage its technology. I wouldn’t ordinarily cover this but am testing to see how interested you are in vendor news. Oops, forget you just read that: it probably spoils the test.

Adobe has released Advertising Cloud TV, which integrates its recently-acquired TubeMogul programmatic TV buying platform with customer data from Adobe Analytics Cloud. The platform can purchase “live linear TV” (conventional broadcasts) and the more advanced kinds (addressable, connected, video on demand, OTT, etc.). The Adobe Analytics integration will let marketers better understand the audiences they wish to pursue, but not necessarily target ads at known individuals.