CDP Institute

Neustar, one of the leaders in building cross-channel customer identities, has launched a Data Directory make it easier for marketers to build custom audiences with Neustar and third party data. Scope is digital advertising across display, mobile, social, and interactive TV channels.

Customer Data Platform vendor mParticle has released a major upgrade that adds point-and-click integration to ingest data from many SaaS platforms.  This substantially increases the range of data the system can manage.  Initial integrations include Kochava, Apsalar, Adjust, Iterable, Urban Airship, MailChimp, Tune, and Zendesk.

Mobile-first marketing automation and loyalty platform SessionM has acquired LoyalTree, which provides integrated point-of-sale marketing software.  The prize is LoyalTree’s API, which will let SessionM deliver its omnichannel campaigns through point-of-sale systems from NCR, Oracle, POSitouch, and others.  Data will also flow back to SessionM to enrich its customer profiles and link marketing campaigns with in-store purchases. 

MarketsandMarkets has a new report predicting that emotion detection and recognition technologies will grow nearly 40% per year, to reach $36 billion by 2021. Scope includes facial expressions, speech, voice, and bio-sensing (ECG, eye tracking, wearable, etc.). This is a major new data source for marketers and their CDP systems, not to mention AI systems in general.

Usermind, which offers journey optimization on top of a unified customer database, announced it is opening its database to third-party analytics and visualization services.

Fishbowl is a customer engagement system for restaurants and Olo is a digital ordering system for restaurants.

If having execution systems that can use improved customer data is one big obstacle to making CDPs valuable, another is being able to actually generate enough different content versions to take advantage of all that precise targeting. Criteo is stepping into that gap, at least for digital advertising, with an ad creation technology that automatically generates contextually-optimized personalized ads tailored to users’ real-time shopping behavior. The company says its tests showed up to 15% higher sales. Note that “up to”.

Lotame is a powerful DMP (Data Management Platform) that targets anonymous individuals across channels and devices.

On the other hand, we have Drawbridge announcing that its cross-device graph (i.e., list of devices that belong to the same person) will be used by Throtle to help link clients’ customer lists to their devices.

Speaking of snake oil – no, wait, that’s a bit harsh.

Marketers may think that they and their systems are the center of the business universe but the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily agree. When Computerworld asked IT managers to describe their single most important technology project, marketing technology ranked a dismal 20th of 28 categories. The list was headed by security, legacy system modernization and on-premise software. Slightly better news is that “customer satisfaction/experience” ranked just behind productivity and security as the project goal. But it’s a safe bet that IT defines customer experience as more than better marketing.

In fact, 38% prefer cleaning toilets to contacting customer service, according to this survey from contact center vendor Aspect. Ouch! Aspect found that 71% would rather solve problems without talking to a live agent, although they want a live agent available if they need oneBusiness. Buried on the last page but relevant to Customer Data Platforms: 80% expect company agents, whether humans or robots, to have every previous interaction available when they reach out for service.