CDP Institute

This study was not issued by Wunderman’s Department of the Obvious, although it could have been. Headline finding is that 79% of consumers ages 18-65 in the US say brands must actively demonstrate “they understand and care about me” before the consumers consider purchasing. No surprise there.  Still, if you’re looking to refresh that opening slide on Growing Customer Expectations, you can find some new stats in the report at www.wantedness.com.

I’ll be honest: it’s a slow news day.

Tracx is one of many social media listening, analysis, and reaction platforms. They just raised another $12.5 million in funding. That’s nice. I’m including this because social media marketing is another important area outside the realm of machine-driven messaging.

Digital marketing agency Rightpoint announced a managed solution based on Core DNA’s digital marketing platform.

Here’s a meatier item, at least in terms of (non-virtual) money: Snapchat is reported to have bought Israeli augmented reality start-up Cimagine. The company’s main current application is seems to be showing buyers what a product would look like in place – say, a new logo on an existing box or new sofa in your living room. I suppose the sky is literally the limit: virtual blimp, anyone?

Looking even further into the future, we have a personal virtual reality camera being announced at the CES show in Las Vegas. Personal virtual reality is exactly where things seem to be headed. Just to be clear, though, this particular product does is use six cameras to create a 360-degree streaming video of your own actual reality to share with others. So it’s still disappointingly tethered to the real world. It does help to clarify the importance of streaming video.

New York City-based Cornell Tech Startup Studio has hatched its first chick, a company called Uru that promised “computer vision-powered, content-aware advertisements”.

Naturally, it’s called the Customer Data Platform Blues and describes the troubles a CDP can solve. It was allegedly recorded in Mississippi in the 1930’s but that seems unlikely.

Trillium Software doesn’t date to the 1930s, but its initial release date of 1994 still makes it one of the oldest customer data management products. Its owner, marketing data services company Harte-Hanks, announced a $112 million sale on November 30 to Syncsort, which offers complementary data integration software. These are the sort of tools your IT department would buy if they wanted to build your customer database instead of using a Customer Data Platform. Let’s just say there’s a verse about this in the CDP Blues song.

If there’s a mid-point between building your own database with tools like Trillium and using a packaged Customer Data Platform, it is probably using tools like Jitterbit, Mulesoft and Snaplogic to share data between source systems. Analyst firm Research and Markets pegs that industry at $528 million in 2016 and expected a 41.5% annual growth rate through 2021. It also cites obstacles to adoption including “application interoperability, high initial cost of implementation, and security concerns.” Exactly.

Netmining, which offers data-driven targeting of programmatic ad buys, will further refine its audiences by integrating with Grapeshot for keyword-level targeting across multiple languages. This will allow international expansion of targeting through Netmining. It’s hard to tell exactly what these people do but it does illustrate the incredible complexity of today’s ad technology.

Not to get all Grinchy on you, but adtech complexity has a big downside: it’s hard to know what’s actually happening. Here we have news that a Russia-based group has been taking in $3 to $5 million per day (that’s more than $1 billion per year) in fraudulent video advertising. This is on an entirely different scale from errors that Facebook has reported in its video viewing metrics – errors that don’t seem to be considered very important by the people paid to consider such things.