CDP Institute

Today we’ll contemplate that most sublime of mysteries: the mind of the consumer. A carefully designed study from Intent Lab tested whether giving consumers what they wanted – that is, showing them products they are looking for – gives better results than trying to address their underlying goals. Turns out that messages related to goals are more effective.

Considerably less surprising, COPC Inc. and Execs In the Know found the strongest driver of customer satisfaction with service experiences is issue resolution. Other unsurprising results: people grow less satisfied as it takes more contacts to resolve an issue, and human-assisted interactions have a higher resolution rate than unassisted interactions. The good news: self-service methods are getting better at resolution and satisfaction with self-service has increased from 40% in 2018 to 60% in 2020.

Finally, the branding gurus at MBLM have assessed the impact of COVID-19 on brand intimacy. The topline finding is people feel an emotional connection with 23% more brands than before the pandemic. But read the study for a slew of concepts including emotional connection, archetypes, relationship stages, and the brand intimacy quotient. So much fun.

The loss of third-party cookies has generated more news than the loss of Amelia Earhart.

COVID-19 gets more attention than third-party cookies, Amelia Earhart, and Bigfoot combined. It’s no surprise that this Acquia report finds marketer and consumer behaviors changed due to the pandemic.  But did you know that 82% of marketers reported their ROI on marketing technology improved during the period? More than half (54%) invested in CDPs, ranking just behind marketing automation (63%) and well ahead of AI and machine learning (44%), personalization (43%), and content management (35%).

It’s no longer news that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, but it’s still interesting to see just how much. AppDirect found 69% of B2B marketers had accelerated digital plans or launched new projects, while 89% of CIOs told Dynatrace that digital transformation has sped up.

Second party data is shared by the company that collected it, while third party data is shared by aggregators who get it from the companies that collected it. Neustar’s new “Second Party Data Marketplace” blurs the distinction by offering consumer profiles from Neustar, ad exposures from iSpot.tv, mobile shopping data from Scanbuy, and geo-location data from Foursquare. It’s all connected with Neustar’s own identity graph.

Precisely has launched a new data integrity suite, with APIs for data cleaning, profiling, matching, geocoding, and enrichment. It runs on-premises, in the cloud, or across both. Martech trivia note: Precisely changed its name from Syncsort in May and acquired the data management systems from Pitney Bowes last December.

Mobile attribution vendor AppsFlyer has introduced Incrementality, a solution that runs tests to determine the incremental impact of remarketing programs. Managing hold-out samples is tough, so that’s noteworthy in itself. But I was also intrigued by AppsFlyer’s statement that “attribution and incrementality are completely independent concepts” – the difference, apparently, being that attribution assigns full or fractional revenue “credit” to marketing touches while incrementality estimates the net revenue change resulting from a touch. Got that?

Google has announced it will no longer allow marketers to target ads for housing, employment, or credit products based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or Zip Code. The change is aimed at blocking discrimination against disadvantaged groups. Coincidentally or not, it comes just as the Justice Department unveiled its long-expected anti-trust suit against the company.

In another burst of social responsibility, ad industry groups have launched a new program to stop the spread of hate on social media. The program, #EngageResponsibly, includes technology for consumers to report hate speech and a database to track hate groups across platforms. Intriguingly, it also lets advertisers calculate the amount of hate speech they are unintentionally supporting and make offsetting contributions to anti-hate groups.

Artificial intelligence raises social issues of its own. In this NTT DATA Services survey, one quarter of executives said their AI system had tried to gain access to restricted data, worked on an unauthorized project, ignored a command, or suggested taking illegal measures for efficiency. There’s also data on AI adoption rates, attitudes towards AI, data strategies, employee retention, change management, and other interesting topics.