Down at the simpler end of the spectrum, this report from Litmus finds that email remains a workhorse channel for most marketers, and in fact has become even more important since last year. The really good news is that users have become more sophisticated, with the more now doing tests and personalizing on advanced data including past interactions (up from 27% to 40%) and purchases (from 38% to 60%).
There’s so much we need to discuss, Dear Reader, that today I’ll jam in more items than usual. We’ll start slowly: project management software vendor Atlassian is launching a $50 million venture fund to support companies that connect to its platforms. Owning an ecosystem clearly is in fashion.
A bill called the “Genetic Information Privacy Act,” has just passed both houses of the California legislature. It is designed to extend beyond biometric areas already covered by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Among the provisions in this new legislation, companies will be required to: 1) provide consumers with more detail about collection and planned use of DNA data, 2) honor consent requests and destroy samples within a specified period, and 3) ensure protection against unauthorized access to or tampering with data.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.