CDP Institute

Captora doesn’t generate content but it does help you decide which content to generate. Specifically, it examines your own and competitive content across the Web to find how different topics and keywords are being used and identify related opportunities. It just added a content promotion module that automatically offers the most appropriate content to each Web site visitor, based on what they’ve consumed in the past. That’s a big move: it makes them a personalization engine.

Let’s talk today about what consumers want.

What else might consumers pay for? Biometric credit card maker SmartMetric asked about biometric credit cards and, by golly, 67% said they’d pay $69.95 for one. SmartMetric matches a user’s fingerprint against a print stored on the card itself, so there’s no privacy-risking central database. Not a bad idea although a recent study found that fingerprint readers may not be all that secure. (If you want more security, EyeLock recently received a patent on linking iris authentication to facial imaging.)

Taking a broader view of consumer preferences, a YouGov study for [24]7 found that 43% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for money-saving personalized promotions, discounts, or deals, and 39% will share it to get speedier issue resolution.

Marketo used to be a marketing automation system but it now calls itself an “engagement platform”. Whatever that is, it just got still broader with the company’s purchase of ToutApp, which helps salespeople send multi-step email campaigns. The extension from marketing to sales supports Marketo’s position in Account Based Marketing, which straddles both worlds.

Folloze is another ABM tool that helps salespeople to run automated email campaigns. Its particular strength is auto-personalized content that salespeople can redistribute to the right prospects. The company just announced a new release and Marketo LaunchPoint integration.

Looking for still more ABM excitement? ABM pure-play Engagio is now integrated with Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, and Marketo – what it calls “all major marketing automation platforms”, although presumably Marketo doesn’t consider itself that. But I digress. Engagio also lets salespeople execute predesigned campaigns, but it stresses that these incorporate all kinds of interactions, not just email.

Yext helps local businesses manage directory listings, reviews, and other parts of their online presence. It’s a specialized but large corner of the marketing technology industry. They just completed their Initial Public Offering, a rare achievement these days. The IPO raised $133 million and yielded a $1.2 billion market capitalization. That’s ten times revenue if you track such things.

MuleSoft, which provides tools for API-based data and process integration, has released a new set of collaboration features aimed at enabling “self-service” access and reuse of integration resources. The company is quite clear that these are tools “for use by IT professionals”, not end-users. They also recently released an interesting survey on IT decision making, which found that misalignment and lack of resources are the biggest causes for failure of IT projects.

The CDP Institute has been publicly wondering whether it should remove “marketer-controlled” from its formal definition of Customer Data Platforms. So far, the feedback has been in favor of keeping it, mostly because marketers are the real buyers and we wouldn’t want to chase them away, would we? But we’d love to hear your thoughts, Dear Reader.  You can post them as blog comments or send an email to editor@cdpinstitute.org.

Oracle has purchased ad and content analytics vendor Moat, which will become part of the Oracle Data Cloud. This is interesting both because it gives Oracle a tool to compete with Adobe’s Web analytics and because ad measurement is a hot topic these days.

More on ad measurement: comScore has expanded its “validated Campaign Essentials” to measure audience demographics, reach, frequency, and GRPs as well as viewability for Facebook display ads. The product already provided similar metrics for Facebook Audiences, Twitter, and Instagram. This is part of advertisers’ increasing resistance to unverified audience claims by the big social networks and to the networks’ power in general.