CDP Institute

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.

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.

Fake news may be a tad less harmful if many of the viewers are actually robots, but those fraudulent clicks still boost the publishers’ revenue. In a rare bit of good news, the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and White Ops reports that revenue lost to ad fraud is down 10% in 2017 from the prior year. The study found that demands for transparency by advertisers can reduce fraud from over 10% to under 2% of spend.

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.

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.