CDP Institute

Email marketers just want to do better email.  A survey from email vendor Emma found that 37% said they most want to do more targeted marketing, compared with just 23% who wanted to do cross-channel campaigns. Automating more work and content testing tied for last at 12%. The biggest barriers were lack of staff (34%) and time (30%), far ahead of inadequate data (16%) or software (10%). Other interesting data in there too.

Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has introduced Cross Domain Analytics, which lets brands track customer activity across their own digital properties by using second party (i.e., shared) cookies. This lets them avoid reliance on third party cookies owned by other companies. Segment notes that second party cookies are less likely to be blocked than third party cookies, providing more complete information. The downside is Cross Domain Analytics won’t track customers across other companies’ properties.

Fast-growing journey orchestration vendor Autopilot has received $12 million in funding, bringing its total to $32 million. Unlike conventional marketing automation systems, Autopilot draws on data stored externally through integrations including Segment, Zapier and Salesforce.com. In fact, Salesforce Ventures is among the new investors. Autopilot reports more than 2,300 customers.

There’s more to marketing today than talking to people. Covisint manages identities and messaging among machines as well as humans. It’s especially well connected in the automobile industry. The company just agreed to be bought for $103 million by enterprise information management vendor OpenText.

SAP has announced new suites of customer experience and data management applications. The customer experience suite, C/4HANA, unifies marketing, commerce, service, sales, and customer data products including Gigya and Callidus Cloud acquisitions. The HANA Data Management Suite collects all kinds of data, including customer information.

Native advertising platform Outbrain, which inserts those ‘you might interested in’ links on your favorite Web sites, has purchased AdNgin, which automatically optimizes ad layouts. One optimizes content and the other optimizes design. It’s a perfect match!

You knew it was National Optimization Day, right? Scaled Inference, an AI start-up in stealth since 2014, is launching Amp.ai, a self-learning optimization platform that picks the best Web site and app actions based on context and user-defined goals. Meanwhile, Boostify has unified its collection of widgets for things like chat, data capture, calls to action, and social proof to create a conversion rate optimization platform. It’s supported by shared services for visitor tracking, segmentation, campaigns, goal tracking, and reporting.

Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. has acquired Placed, which tracks the locations of opt-in audience members. Among other services, Placed matches its list with ad audiences provided by marketers to compare the behavior of people who saw an ad to those who didn’t. Price wasn’t disclosed but Geekwire said the deal could be worth more than $200 million.

Business process and customer experience management vendor Pegasystems has extended its marketing offerings to include paid media. The Paid Media Manager will estimate the value of individually-targeted ads on Facebook, Google, and other networks. It will typically push lists of known individuals and the ad value for each individual to external networks, although it could also respond in real time to requests for an individual value. The important feature is the values are updated dynamically using predictive models and data a client collects about its customers in the Pegasystems database.

I know what you’re thinking: we haven’t mentioned artificial intelligence yet this week and it’s already Tuesday. Never fear. Start-up Quantifi has launched a tool whose AI “coaches marketers through creating a successful digital strategy by providing insights and recommending the most effective next steps.” The system recommends, runs, and evaluates tests of audience segments, creative options and channels, drawing on an ever-expanding proprietary database of past results for many companies. They have more than $2 million in seed funding.

Ad blocking by consumers isn’t a response to fake news, although it does threaten the economics of both legitimate and illegitimate publishers. A study from AdBlock Plus and Global Web Index found that 40% of respondents used an ad blocker in the past month. Ad blocking is likely to increase since it’s more common among younger users, just over half the respondents still don’t know ad blockers are available, of U.S. and mobile ad blocking happens less often in the U.S. (so far) than in Asia.

Revcontent drives traffic to client Web sites by putting links to relevant articles on other sites. It’s been criticized for driving traffic and revenue to fake news sites. The company has just launched a “Truth in Media Initiative” that lets consumers report articles they believe to be fake. It’s not clear how this helps, since the people reading those articles probably think they’re true. On the other side, motivated partisans and partisan-bots could easily attack accurate news sites as fake.