CDP Institute

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.

Retailers are struggling in the face of online competition. But it’s not hopeless: a study from Trendsource finds that most consumers still prefer in-store shopping, even for electronics. Not surprisingly, “getting the items immediately” was the biggest reason to buy in person. Help from store staff was somewhere in the middle while in-store technology and social interaction were dead last.

Whether consumers want it or not, retailers are adding tech to in-store experiences. This study from RetailWire found that one-third of stores already communicate with in-store shoppers via social media and another 25% are working on it. Personalized greetings and feeding customer data to associates were also popular applications. The biggest obstacles are cost and customers’ privacy concerns.

RetailWire also found that tech vendors are even more excited about in-store systems than the retailers themselves. Here’s news that mobile data exchange adsquare has added proximity data from Unacast to help mobile advertisers target location-based messages in real time. And here’s a study from Opus Research describing ways that retailers track customer locations within their stores for even more precise targeting.

Marketing automation is so 2012. Today’s hot category is customer experience orchestration. The latest entry is Sydney-based PASCAL51, which has just announced $250,000 in seed capital and plans for a beta program. What’s impressive is that so little capital can fund a system that “ingests data, learns from it, generates an insight and subsequent recommendation and then automates the next best action”. One enabler is using open source technologies including Kafka, Spark and Hadoop.

Speaking of hot categories, how about augmented reality, amirite? Cosmetics company Estée Lauder is using an AR app called ModiFace to let users virtually apply makeup to their own photo. This amuses me in a coals-to-New Castle way because cosmetics are the original augmented reality. Yes, I’m easily amused.

Enough hilarity. Let’s get back to nagging you about compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Here’s a post on our very own CDP Institute blog explaining how Customer Data Platforms can help with GDPR compliance.

OnePulse is a social media community app that takes surveys for marketers. That puts them in the same neighborhood as Lithium and Market Logic. But they must have a smaller apartment, since they just announced a modest $2 million in new funding (bringing their total to $3 million) ahead of their U.S. launch.

Vista Equity Partners continues to expand its stable of sales and marketing tech vendors.  Vista just announced acquisition of social media management and online community developer Lithium. The deal comes one day after Vista said it is buying sales incentive compensation vendor Xactly and a month after Vista purchased competitive intelligence vendor Market Track. Vista purchased marketing cloud vendor Marketo exactly one year ago, and Marketo itself purchased sales enablement vendor ToutApp last month.

Sticking with investment news, marketing information management platform Market Logic announced a €45 million ($50 million) investment by GENUI and Summit Partners. The firm had taken less than $2 million previously. Market Logic lets companies access structured and unstructured information about customers, competitors, and market activity. Lots of fancy cognitive computing, natural language processing, and machine learning happening here.

We all know it’s hard to measure marketing performance. Still, it’s helpful that professional community Brand Innovators and marketing measurement vendor Origami Logic has given us some metrics on the topic. Maybe the most interesting finding is the companies that are best at measurement are most likely to get outside help: 77% of self-declared “innovators” and 63% of “leaders” using third party measurement software, compared with just 45% of “basic” users. Infrastructure and data integration were the biggest obstacles. Other interesting stuff too.

Taking a broader perspective, analytics technology vendor Interana found that marketing is the most data-driven of all departments and insights into user behavior is the most asked question. But just 7% of companies give end-users the tools they need to answer questions on their own, while 73% commonly wait days to weeks for someone else to give them an answer.