Today we’ll contemplate that most sublime of mysteries: the mind of the consumer. A carefully designed study from Intent Lab tested whether giving consumers what they wanted – that is, showing them products they are looking for – gives better results than trying to address their underlying goals. Turns out that messages related to goals are more effective.

Mobile attribution vendor AppsFlyer has introduced Incrementality, a solution that runs tests to determine the incremental impact of remarketing programs. Managing hold-out samples is tough, so that’s noteworthy in itself. But I was also intrigued by AppsFlyer’s statement that “attribution and incrementality are completely independent concepts” – the difference, apparently, being that attribution assigns full or fractional revenue “credit” to marketing touches while incrementality estimates the net revenue change resulting from a touch. Got that?

Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime.  In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds.  It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.