It’s shaping up as a slow news week, Dear Reader. I’ll do my best. Let’s start with news that sales enablement platform InsideSales has launched “AI-driven email prospecting”. Two features seem to make it special: ability to track multi-recipient opens, forwards, clicks, and attachment downloads and ability to embed videos, product demonstrations, and attachments. It’s not entirely clear how AI plays into this but I guess it’s neat anyway.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the official start of the holiday shopping season. So let’s look at shopping behavior. We’ll start with a survey from real estate firm JLL Retail, which finds that just 31% of consumers expect to do most of their shopping in physical stores, although another 15% will buy online and pick up at a retailer. Just over half will make at least one purchase from their phone, up from 22% last year.
Ad optimization vendor Thunder Experience Cloud conducted a much more elaborate research project, analyzing billions of ad impressions to compare cookie- and device-based identification with people-based identification from LiveRamp. They found that cookie- and device-based methods report twice as many unique individuals as people-based methods. In other words, people-based measurement shows that the ads reached half as many different people and each person received twice as many impressions as cookie- and device-based measurement reported. The gap grew larger as campaigns got bigger.
Reports emerged at the weekend that Salesforce was in advanced talks to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica. The deal would be Salesforce’s largest since acquiring Slack in 2021, and shares fell 7% Monday on the news. Informatica would add more advanced technical capabilities to the Salesforce product line.