CDP Institute

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.

June is the gateway to summer romance. Pairing up seems to be in fashion for marketing vendors too. Account Based Marketing vendor ZenIQ announced a $4.6 million investment by investors including Salesforce Ventures.  ZenIQ combines first and third party data into something like a Customer Data Platform.  It then applies artificial intelligence to recommend and help execute Account Based Marketing projects. Salesforce apparently sees ZenIQ as complementing the AI-powered ABM offering, it launched last week.

Pinterest has many new friends. Nielsen announced it will provide audience verification metrics for Pinterest mobile campaigns. Neustar MarketShare will measure the impact of Pinterest campaigns on online conversion, brand lift, in-store sales, and mobile app installs. And Acxiom announced it will match online and offline retail transactions with Pinterest ad campaign recipients in a privacy safe way.

Measurement partnerships must be in fashion. Measurement specialist Marketing Measurement Analytics (MMA) has joined Google’s Marketing Mix Model Partners program, which gives access to detailed information about ads on Google video, display, and search campaigns. These fuel estimates of campaign impact on online and offline sales. Meanwhile, Facebook and Integral Ad Science have extended their relationship, providing independent measurement of ad viewability and fraud across Facebook, Instagram, and the Facebook Audience Network.

So many robots, so little time. Dynamic content generator Wylei has launched an AI-powered, SaaS-based “Optimization Cloud” that uses automated testing to optimize personalized email, Facebook, video, and display ads. Marketers upload their assets and the system automatically tests which combinations work best for which customer micro-segments. The company says it has improved conversion rates by 35% to 200%.

Ad tech vendor PulsePoint has upgraded Story by PulsePoint, which uses AI to manage content marketing programs across social media, native, and content discovery platforms. It optimizes for post-click engagement, not just lowest cost per click.

Blueshift creates personalized messages for email, Web sites, and mobile apps. It partners with several Customer Data Platform vendors to help assemble the unified profiles that drive those messages. The company just launched an “AI-Powered Cross-Channel Visual Journey Builder” that runs manually-designed campaigns but uses AI to decide when to add customers to each campaign and to personalize the choice of products and contents offered within campaign messages.

“Digital transformation” can describe many types of change. But this Accenture study paints a specific picture of a future where subscription services replace traditional pick-it-off-the-shelf retail. The accompanying survey found that 63% of consumers would consider automatic replenishment of household goods like detergent and 24% would let brands select products for them automatically.

Subscriptions may be a long-term threat to retail, but the immediate danger comes from online shopping. PriceLocal helps local stores fight back by hijacking Amazon business. Consumers install a browser extension that watches their Amazon searches and can place orders for same day pickup at local stores at the Amazon Prime price. The service just added 10,000 new stores to its roster, including Target, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Office Depot, Fry’s, and Toys R Us.

If subscription services replace retailers and consumers shop mostly within closed systems like Amazon and Facebook, it gets really hard for advertising to have an impact. But until that happens, Dentsu Aegis Network hopes to target all ads at specific (though anonymized) individuals. It has just launched M1, a “people-based marketing platform” that assigns a persistent anonymized ID to every adult in the U.S. and can synch that ID with publishers’ own IDs. It currently has 242 million anonymized profiles based on actual name, address, and/or email address.

Let’s do news from CDP vendors today. Tealium announced new capabilities to stream data into cloud computing platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Key benefits include real-time data collection, prebuilt connectors for more than 1,000 source systems, and transformation of data before it is fed into destination systems.

Next: Datorama added a connector to social intelligence aggregator DataSift. Specifically, Datorama customers will be able to load anonymized and aggregated LinkedIn data gathered by DataSift and exposed through its Media Strategies API. DataSift launched the API last month and has several partners using it. Datorama integrates and exposes customer data from multiple sources.  This makes it a true CDP, although the company focuses primarily on using the data for marketing performance measurement.