CDP Institute

By now, it’s old news that marketers overestimate how good they are at personalization.  This Sailthru survey repeats the trope: 71% of marketers think they “excel” at personalized marketing while just 34% of consumers agree.  Other, less common findings include: email personalization is more important to consumers than to marketers, and big companies do much more advanced personalization than smaller ones.  Worth a look.

Our privacy newsletter ordinarily covers tools for responding to consumer data requests (DSRs to the cognoscenti).  But this news is about CDP vendor mParticle adding a DSR function, so we grabbed it while the editor wasn’t looking.  The new feature can send automatically data erasure requests to third-party data stores including BigQuery, Redshift, and Snowflake, eliminating one of the biggest headaches in many DSR processes.

Amazon continues to spread its wings, or tentacles depending on your point of view.  Their latest stretch is “Buy with Prime” which lets Prime members receive free delivery and returns when shopping on non-Amazon websites.  Consumers get more convenience, cooperating merchants may get more sales, and Amazon gets new fees and customer data.

Our friends at messaging platform Gupshup are at it again: after purchasing conversational AI platform Active.AI earlier this month, they just bought AskSid.  Active.AI specializes in financial services while AskSid specializes in ecommerce and retail.

Self-service is a Thing these days, as companies try to do more things more quickly without more staff.  Here we have adtech firm Audiencex releasing a self-service ad buying platform for performance marketers, who focus on measurable results.  The product is aimed at small and mid-size companies who buy programmatic media.

You’ve almost surely heard the reports that Netflix is seriously considering an ad-supported version of its service, so I can’t really claim it’s news.  But I will point out that for all the hand-wringing among people who dislike ads, there’s plenty of research that most consumers will gladly watch them in return for free or lower-price services.   So it’s probably a good idea.

Marketers tend to focus on the impact of privacy changes on targeting, but measurement is harder too.  In fact, 90% of respondents to this global survey from Salesforce said privacy has fundamentally changed how they measure results.  Just one-third get insights quickly enough to make decisions, and only 29% evaluate cross-channel performance with a cross-channel solution.  Oh, and 50% increased investment in CDPs as a result of privacy changes – second only to 52% who increased investment in analytics and measurement.