CDP Institute

B2B profiling vendor MarianaIQ was built from the start on using artificial intelligence to identify buyer personas. They’ve just announced a neural network-based model to help companies find new target accounts. Also new: a targeting option for Google AdWords, which joins existing Twitter and Facebook ad capabilities.

Pretty much every presentation on marketing technology now starts with rising customer expectations for personalization. Fair enough, but what else is on their minds? Maru/Matchbox, whose business is customer marketing insights, finds that trust is eroding in pretty much everything (yeah, we knew that) and one result is stalled growth in the sharing economy (that one is news to me). Back in unsurprising territory: Millennials participate much more in the sharing economy than their elders.

Lack of trust is followed by active hostility to established institutions – something else you might have noticed in recent days.

People who don’t trust anyone else want more control for themselves, right? Sure enough, that’s what integrated communications firm Finn Partners found when they asked consumers about smart technologies.  People were more enthusiastic about smart home appliances than self-driving cars, which only means they haven’t read enough science fiction about renegade vacuum cleaners. Ever pragmatic, they were three times more likely to cite cost than privacy as an obstacle to smart home tech. Finn will also send a copy of the study on request.

Chat is hot. This study from in-app messaging vendor Apptentive found a 33% increase in interaction rates among its customers in the past year: companies went from interacting with 9% of their customers to 12%, and response rates also inched up from 62% to 65%. Some other interesting stats in the report, but most useful was a link to a SearchMarketingDaily article that reported 70% of chatbot interactions ultimately require human intervention and itself linked to several other studies.

Of course, chat is only useful if someone answers. CRM vendor SuperOffice tested 1,000 companies and found that 21% didn’t respond to live chat support requests, even when they were made during business hours. They also found other best practices are widely ignored: 23% of companies don’t ask for contact information before starting a chat, 45% don’t ask for feedback after the chat, and 55% don’t offer transcripts. Irony alert: there’s no chat option on SuperOffice’s own Web site. It does seem to be available in their CRM system.

Tagove offers tools for video, voice, and text chat along with related features such as screen sharing and co-browsing. It has just added an integrated CRM to store conversation results and do other CRMish things like lead management, task creation, and outbound emails. It seems like buying a car from your windshield wiper manufacturer. Is CRM really that much of a commodity?

Did you ever have that dream where you’re asked to the size of the marketing technology industry, and find answers ranging from $14 billion to $230 billion?

Newly-independent Aprimo is eager to get its share of that $4 billion piece. It just released an updated campaign management solution and new distributed marketing capabilities. While they’d be happy to sell you campaign management, Aprimo’s main focus these days is on marketing operations, which it defines as planning, spending, creation, distribution, and performance management. The company strengthened that portion of its business in March with purchase of digital asset management vendor ADAM Software.

Campaign management is worthless without good customer data, right? A Customer Data Platform is generally the best approach, but if all you want is a simple deduplication tool, you’ll be happy to know that Melissa has made its venerable MatchUp matching system available as a cloud service. Melissa announced a more comprehensive offering last month, incorporating Pentaho data integration tools. But it’s still pretty much a do-it-yourself project.

Speaking of inevitable: if consumers are going to be targeted no matter what, they might as well get paid for allowing it, right? That’s more or less the principle behind People.io, which gives people modest rewards in exchange for answering questions about their interests, activities, or habits. The information is used to target advertisements, although personal data is never shared outside of People.io It’s all GDPR complaint. The company just did its first major international deal, making a version of its app available to 44 million customers of Telefónica Germany.

Here’s a fun item: Toronto-based Cluep analyzes images that people post on social media, extracts information such as brands, products, and activities, and uses it to target real-time advertising. It also identifies the age, gender, and ethnicity of people in the pictures; analyzes sentiments expressed towards topics, brands, and keywords; and incorporates weather and location-based targeting. On second thought, is that fun or is it creepy?