CDP Institute

ZyloTech, a MIT spin-off launched in 2014 as DataXylo, has announced its own solution to understand customers based on their data.

You probably don’t care that the Looker data analysis platform just announced connectors to load data from AdWords, YouTube, and DoubleClick into the Google BigQuery data store. Neither do I.  But it’s an excuse to note that Looker and similar products are NOT substitutes for CDPs because they don’t unify customer identities when inputs lack a shared customer identifier. It’s an easy distinction to miss, and one that probably leads quite a few people down quite a few dead ends.  Consider yourself warned.

What do the State of Maine, Under Armour, and Major League Baseball have in common?

Now I remember why this has been sitting in my queue for two weeks: Juniper Networks announced a fascinating survey on business and consumer attitudes towards “digital cohesion” but didn't release the data.

I’ll admit that headline grabbed my attention.

Since we’re now on the topic of automated data management, here’s a pre-announcement from AllSight of their latest “customer intelligence management” release.  It links data fragments and existing customer records to build a complete customer profile. Other modules provide prebuilt analytical functions to infer important customer attributes, and dashboards to help examine the data. AllSight also works on Spark and Hadoop. It’s another example of productivity-enhancing tools that enable CDPs or custom-built equivalents. The new version is due before July.

ClearStory Data announced new capabilities for “automated smart data discovery”, which makes it easier to find patterns in business data. ClearStory’s focus is data analysis, but it also automates data preparation and unification. So we’re back on CDP turf. Spark is once again listed as a key technology.

IBM and Salesforce.com announced a strategic partnership to connect their respective artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. What’s intriguing is the press release describes the deal as bringing Watson’s “structured and unstructured data” to the party, not any grand cognitive capabilities. They specifically mention exposing data from IBM’s Weather.com business within Salesforce. More evidence that AI is approaching a commodity but data is the new crown jewel.

Web retargeting expert AdRoll issued an interesting report on the State of Performance Marketing. Topics range across the entire funnel and interesting tidbits include: 78% of marketing budgets are spent on acquisition; 69% of marketers send dynamic emails based on behavior; and 57% plan to move away from single-click attribution in the future. That’s a big shift but one that, as AdRoll points out, would assign more value to retargeting.

The CDP Institute recently asked several senior IT managers for their opinions on Customer Data Platforms. They had a number of objections that deserve to be taken seriously. Read more on our blog.

Today's newsletter could have covered sales enablement tools (boring but real) or automated creative (fun but speculative).

Further down the automated creative trail, Wibbitz uses natural language processing to interpret text embedded in email, video, metadata, social posts, personal profiles, etc., and then assembles snippets into a video that presents the same ideas as the original text. So the next time your life flashes before your eyes, you may be facing a Wibbitz-based advertisement instead of imminent death. A cheering prospect.