CDP Institute

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.

Can we issue a pre-emptive ban, or at least apply extreme vetting, on referring to artificial-intelligence-based products as “self-driving”? This SnapLogic announcement actually describes an AI-based feature that recommends steps in building data pipelines. That’s more like “AI-based back seat driving”, a description I don’t expect to catch fire. Crankiness aside, AI has a huge potential to simplify data integration. SnapLogic isn’t the first to use it that way but it’s still good they do.

Our AI friends at IBM have introduced “Watson Marketing Insights”, which continuously examines customer interactions and attributes to find which items predict behaviors.  It then builds segments based on those items and presents them to marketers, who will hopefully find inspiration for new campaigns. There’s no claim that the AI is doing anything other the providing information – it’s not making suggestions, let alone taking action. One suspects Watson has higher ambitions but is too canny to reveal them openly.

And here’s Mintigo announcing delivery of its own AI-based sales intelligence data to users of SAP’s C4C CRM system. This follows similar integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. Again, this is only about delivering information, not telling anyone what to do with it. Nothing wrong with that.

File this under “vertical solutions are way more common than you think”.

Sticking with vertical products, VizExplorer provides casinos with analytics on everything from CRM to floor space to maintenance staff. It has just upgraded its marketing campaign manager to improve segmentation, testing, and campaign design. VizExplorer doesn’t run operational processes; instead, it pulls data from operational systems into a CDP-style data integration hub.  Even so, the tight integration between industry-specific operations and marketing is typical of vertical solutions, giving them an advantage over general purpose systems.

Retail qualifies as a vertical, although I don’t have a retail product to discuss. But here’s a MarketTrack study on shopper preferences for online vs in-store shopping. Despite all the bad news you’ve read about bricks-and-mortar retailers, shoppers in most categories still prefer to buy in a physical store. But younger shoppers lean more towards online and 80% of respondents said they do online price comparisons. So the prospects for conventional in-store retail do look rather bleak.

Programmatic ad platform MediaMath has launched “Curated Market”, a pool of ad placements guaranteed to be brand-safe.

In another sign of the times, research firm Frost & Sullivan has issued a report estimating that the market for contact center systems will actually fall by nearly 2% per year through 2020. Phone agents are being replaced by many types of self-service and automated systems. Some research suggests consumers often prefer non-human interactions but I suspect the main driver here is lower costs for companies, customer preferences be damned.

Here’s one more big picture item: Millenial employees pose the biggest security risk facing IT, according to a survey from Citrix and The Ponemon Institute. The problem isn’t Millenials revolting against The Man, but their introduction of mobile devices and collaboration tools without approval of corporate IT. Another losing battle against chaos, it would seem. Happy Friday!

Airlines get away with abusing passengers because fliers have little real choice.

Let’s stick with customer experience, although the news remains grim. A study from digital services vendor DimensionData finds that just 13% of organizations rate their customer experience at 9 of 10 or better, even though 71% say it’s their top strategic performance measure. Similarly, connected customer journeys via omnichannel solutions are the top-ranked technology trend for 2017 but 70% of companies have no or very few channels currently connected. A charmingly delusional 80% expect to have all or most channels connected within two years.