CDP Institute

Might as well stick with product news today. Pegasystems, which manages customer-related business processes, has announced new artificial intelligence features that will analyze “millions of actions taken every day on every desktop from any application” to uncover inefficiencies in sales and service operations. Examples include excessive toggling between different applications, time spent on unproductive activities, and productivity lost to slow system response. AI-based features don’t really qualify as news these days, but this item does illustrate how AI can be used for more than content recommendations.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has discarded a set of privacy rules that would have blocked broadband providers from using information about their customers’ viewing habits without consent. The regulations would have required internet service providers to meet more stringent security standards regarding their customers’ personal information. No need for that.

Here’s a crazy coincidence: one day after the FCC gave cable operators easier access to customer data, cable operator Altice announced its acquisition of Audience Partners, which uses audience data to target TV and online advertising at individuals. Altice is the fourth largest cable operator in the U.S., with most customers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

No privacy issues here, folks: Dallas-based Ortus Labs has released software that lets any network-connected video camera “identify, differentiate and track people, vehicles, or objects in motion.” The breakthrough is using artificial intelligence software instead of expensive image-processing hardware, thereby reducing the cost and expanding the number of feeds. It’s not clear whether the system can identify individuals or just distinguish people from objects. Then again, it’s trainable, so the answer might change in the future.  Nope, no privacy issues at all.

If identity verification is important, then Identity-Verification-as-a-Service can’t be far behind.

I wonder what’s new in identity verification? asked no marketer, ever.

This item is a bit meta: it’s about verifying your verification. Video archiving software from Dialogic is being used to capture identity verification interactions on mobile devices. Inability to record the interactions had prevented banks from signing up customers without a face-to-face meeting. The technology may not seem very special but the option to open new accounts remotely is a big deal – and the sort of thing that consumers quickly insist you offer to earn their business.

Trillum Software started doing customer data quality and identity resolution in 1994, back when it mostly involved postal addresses.

“Marketers don’t need more data. They need help using it - that’s the missing component in today’s marketing stack,” says Bluecore CEO Fayez Mohamood in their press release.

Squiz, a “global digital transformation organization”, asked 600+ senior marketers at large enterprises about marketing technology.

Cornell.edu defines hyperbolic geometry as “the geometry you get by assuming all the postulates of Euclid, except the fifth one, which is replaced by its negation.“

Criteo also uses advanced math to optimize marketing programs, in its case doing cross-device matching, buying display, social and mobile app ads, and tailoring the ads to each viewer and context. The company just released a research study on cross-device commerce.  It documents the continued growth of purchases on mobile devices and finds that one-third of online transactions may be misattributed without cross-device tracking.  Interesting data.