CDP Institute

Here’s another non-marketing use for customer data: in this case, providing intelligent advice to sales people. PROS offers cloud-based solutions to help with product recommendations, pricing, and deal management; it can advise human agents or feed directly into Web sites. And it uses “advanced data science”…but then again, nowadays, who doesn’t?

Speaking of self-referential, this post from Friday’s Customer Experience Matrix blog analyzes the state of unified customer data using bits of many published surveys. A Franken-survey, if you will. It’s definitely frightening enough to be worthy of Halloween. Come to think of it, if you haven’t picked your costume yet, why go not an Enterprise Data Warehouse? All you need is a half-painted black box with a big funnel to pour data into and no way to get it out. Why half-painted? Because it never gets finished.

We might as well go for the self-reference trifecta. The Institute is working with MarTech Advisor on a survey about customer data management practices. Please fill it out here and pass the link on to others. Thanks!

Well, this is meta: a newsletter item about a press release announcing future publication of the newsletter. I don’t think reading it will cause a tear in the space-time continuum, but then again, it might. Click here if you’re brave enough to find out.

This is a pretty technical item, but it comes down to giving marketers more precise targeting. The sort of thing that makes them happy, unlike FCC regulations that trend in the other direction.

Marketers have been fretting about the threat of serious privacy regulations for decades, but nothing that really restricts their freedom ever seems to get passed. It looks like we may be facing an exception: The FCC just passed regulations that could actually prevent internet service providers from using personal behavior data without consent. Maybe if cable companies were slightly less unpopular it wouldn’t have happened. And maybe it will still get changed.

Most Customer Data Platforms are built for enterprise marketers and priced accordingly. Hull.io is sold to small B2B firms. Cool.

A new forecast from Zenith, a global media agency, predicts that mobile devices will account for 75% of global internet use next year.

This report from Euclid Analytics finds that 83% of shoppers use a mobile device while inside a retail store. Euclid is a specialist in tracking in-store behavior and connecting it to online behavior. So here’s yet another reminder how much you need to link mobile and real-word identities.

Criteo launched a new Predictive Search product that automatically optimizes paid search bids in Google Shopping campaigns based on user intent, device, and behavior as well as non-individual factors. One key enabler is Criteo’s Universal Match technology, which tracks anonymized users across all devices, browsers and apps. Criteo applies the same technology to personalize dynamic email, retargeting, social and mobile app advertising. So think of this as today’s good news story: yes, there are solutions to the challenge of identifying cross-channel behaviors.

BloomReach, a machine learning-based e-commerce recommendation platform, announced it has purchased Hippo, a personalized Web content management system. Clearly they complement each other. But in a world where everything is supposed to plug into everything else via APIs, it’s interesting to see what looks suspiciously like old-school product integration. Are they telling us that API integrations aren’t quite as smooth as promised?

Qubit has added machine learning engine to uncover and alerts marketers to segments with high potential value. This extends Qubit’s existing digital experience management, which encompasses personalization, experimentation and optimization across email, Web, and other channels. Qubit builds a unified customer profile to support all this, although they shy away from calling themselves a Customer Data Platform.