CDP Institute

As marketing departments ramp up their data and technology skills, ad agencies need to keep pace or risk losing more business.

You’ve had a busy week and are looking forward to some relaxation, right? Let’s start the weekend early with some fun tech stuff. First up is Clarifai, which uses artificial intelligence to tag images in photos and videos. They recently added more than 100 fashion-related concepts and more than 10,000 recognized celebrities. Tagging makes it easier to relate content consumption to viewer interests, explained Captain Obvious.

Next, news that oddly-named Ayuda[x] is testing an AI-driven ad server for digital billboards, in-store displays, and such. The system monitors mobile device signals to measure in-store foot traffic, correlates the traffic with ad messages, and adjusts the messages to improve results. Cool but it’s still not targeted at specific individuals, Minority Report-style.

And, since the real world just isn’t big enough for all the messages marketers need to send, start-up ADVR has launched a “discovery marketing engine for virtual and augmented reality applications”.

B2B data and predictive analytics vendor Radius now gives clients unlimited, no-extra-charge use of its business company and contact data. Radius leverages a “network of record” built by compiling information from public, commercial, and client sources. Data is refreshed continuously so changes from any source are quickly reflected. Client-provided data is used only to verify information from other sources, so data unique to one client is not shared with others. Packages start around $50,000 per year depending on the services.

Customer identity specialist Signal has launched a system that spans online and offline channels.

Content recommendation vendor Taboola announced a partnership with LiveIntent, which embeds advertising within email newsletters. The alliance will allow more personalized selection of the content that LiveIntent delivers to each user. LiveIntent relies on users to log in to identify themselves. It serves 160 million unique people each month in three billion email newsletters from 1,600 U.S. publishers.

We reported a survey yesterday that found Software as a Service accounted for just 15% of application deployments, while other cloud environments accounted for 48%.

Back on the more familiar turf of marketing systems, a study from the CMO Council and Redpoint Global found that just 7% of companies can always deliver real-time data-driven experiences across all digital and physical touchpoints.

We’ve now looked at things from IT and marketer perspectives, so let’s finish with the customer herself.

We’re all familiar with Gartner’s 2011 prediction http://ism7505.business.wayne.edu/Week1/doc/january_3_cmoasbuyingcenter_lmclellan.pdf that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is one reason that marketers can buy technology for themselves.