Lots of small-but-significant news today, Dear Reader. Oracle has purchased cloud-based loyalty platform CrowdTwist. Industry trends illustrated: marketers focus on full life cycle, not just acquisition; cross-channel orchestration; shift to cloud; expanded scope for enterprise marketing vendors; prebuilt campaigns to speed deployment.
Any remaining hope that current online data sharing practices would somehow survive pretty much died this week, when the European Union’s highest court ruled that placing any cookie requires “active consent” – as in ticking an unticked-by-default check box – and that cookies for data sharing can’t be combined with cookies for other purposes. The ruling also specifies that consent language clearly identify the third parties that will gain access to the data.
Switching gears, this Invoca survey found that data quality is the most common obstacle to using customer data to optimize ad performance (46%). Privacy is next (42%), followed by too much data (31%) and collecting data from silos (28%). It’s a helpful reminder about a problem that’s easy to overlook when you’re planning that oh-so-sexy CDP.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.