More big tech news: Facebook is trying to grow its commercial software business by recruiting partners to push Workplace, a private version of Facebook shared among a company’s employees. Facebook’s goal is probably to gather personal data that’s unprotected by consumer privacy regulations. But you could also see this as entry into martech.
Studies including this from Avionos, this from Deloitte, this from Yes Marketing, and this from Signs.com all show that consumers care more about a convenient, low cost shopping experience than personalized recommendations. But, as this Sitecore study reports, marketers persist in believing the opposite. If you’re part of that majority, you’ll be thrilled that you can now use Amazon’s very own personalization algorithms on AWS. Cynics will see an Amazon plot to distract competitors from what’s really important. Optimists will argue that making personalization easy frees resources for other improvements.
Chatbot vendor Aivo has a more positive view of AI’s results, reporting that its clients found chatbots could resolve 65% of e-commerce customer inquiries. It found most questions were requests for information not found on a company’s Web site, which chatbots were good at providing. Download for interesting details on chatbot deployment.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.