CDP Institute

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.

Few marketers will see TV as cutting edge. But even the 27% who see mobile as “the next big thing” are behind the times, according to search optimization vendor BrightEdge. It’s really a “post-mobile world” that will be dominated by technologies including voice search, artificial intelligence, and hyper-local targeting. There’s a lot of really interesting insight here, although BrightEdge hasn’t packaged it very conveniently.  For another vision of the future, check out this post on the Customer Experience Matrix blog.

You surprised me last week, Dear Reader, by downloading more copies than expected of that IAB study on mobile identities and cross-device matching. So here’s more on the topic, this time from CDP vendor and attribution specialist Datalicious. They found that cookie-based measurement is especially bad at tracking the impact of mobile advertising. No surprise but lots of numbers that prove what you suspected.

On the theory that you read this newsletter because you’re interested in managing data, here’s a report that Talend has updated its data integration software to connect with cloud platforms including Cloudera Altus, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake. It already had an Amazon Web Services connector. Talend also announced AI-powered services to improve data matching and cleansing.

Another theory is you like to read funding announcements. Okay, then: CognitiveScale, which offers customer- and employee-facing products that interpret and respond to user behaviors, recently added $15 million in funding, bringing its total to $50 million. Meanwhile, Element AI raised $102 million to grow its business, offers AI-based advertising, customer engagement, and contact center applications among many other things. Element AI says it’s the biggest-ever Series A funding round for an AI company.

More than one-third of marketers polled have already begun to integrate martech and adtech, according to a Forrester survey sponsored by LiveIntent, which places advertisements within emails. More than half (57%) expect their own companies to “converge” the technologies within the next two years. The study doesn’t explicitly define what “converging” the technologies would mean or when it became a transitive verb.

Here’s another look at broad industry trends, this time from UK-based research firm Incite Group. They found marketers’ most pressing 2017 priorities are personalization, understanding customers and building a single customer view, which of course means they should all buy Customer Data Platforms. Lowest immediate priorities included futuristic things like artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and virtual reality, which is understandable, and attribution, which is a bit more disturbing.

Maybe marketers should pay more immediate attention to AI.

A messaging vendor recently told me that mobile wallets are the next big thing in customer interaction. They may have a point: wallets are one of the few ways to reach customers at scale without going through the walled garden vendors (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon). This study from financial technology provider Fiserv doesn’t make that particular case but it does give some general information on use of mobile technology for financial services. One big shift: consumers have moved past balance look-ups to complex transactions like bill payment.

Mobile identities and cross-device matching are among the most confusing topics in our industry. The IAB just published a detailed paper that explains the mechanics and related best practices for treating customer information properly. If you’re not already an expert, this will let you sound like one.