CDP Institute

Oracle has reportedly told advertisers its Oracle Data Cloud DMP will stop offering third-party targeting data to customers in Europe. Cookie-based collection of such data has looked increasingly like a GDPR violation and the decision may have been hastened by class action lawsuits filed in August against Oracle and Salesforce.

Marketers have grown more fearful of artificial intelligence since the pandemic began, according to R.R. Donnelley research. Concern that AI or machine learning would limit their personal growth grew from 14% in late 2019 to 59% in mid-2020. Worry that AI and ML would reduce creativity and intuition grew from 27% to 68%. Lots more here of interest.

One sign that AI is taking over will be marketing campaigns designed for AI to manage. Right on cue, our friends at Facebook have limited the number of ad variations allowed per page so their machine learning tools can learn more quickly which versions work best. Did you really need yet another sign of the apocalypse?

We have an unexpected glut of worthy items today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with something for you no-code fans: Google has launched Business Application Platform, which combines its Apigee API management and AppSheet no-code development platform. Sadly, neither is headless, so I can’t say two headlesses are better than one.

Next, a tasty acquisition: customer service platform Astute is buying social media marketing platform Socialbakers. The deal gives Astute more marketing capabilities and access to Socialbakers’ 2,500+ client brands. Yummy.

Our final pairing is GumGum and Dentsu Aegis, who partnered to find that contextual ads are more cost-efficient than behavior-based placements. The test was exceptionally well-designed and documented, which isn’t always true for such studies. The answer matters because many advertisers are wondering whether contextual targeting can replace behavioral targeting, which relies heavily on those soon-to-vanish third party cookies.

We can’t call customer experience technology “CXtech”, for obvious reasons. But we do have a lot of news about it today. We’ll start with a $200 million raise for unified customer experience platform Sprinklr, bringing its total to $587.5 million.

Sprinklr grew from a base in social media management, while Infobip started in telecommunications. But it also now offers a much broader solution, having just launched omnichannel customer engagement hub. The new module, called Moments, orchestrates campaigns across pretty much every digital channel and builds a unified customer database underneath.

At Salsify, CX stands for Commerce Experience – an extension of product information management to include sharing order and inventory data across retailers, distributors, online marketplaces, social commerce, and direct-to-consumer Web sites. The cross-channel unification enables manufacturers to respond quickly to demand changes wherever they appear.

Segment has released a new feature, Data Lakes, that automatically converts raw data into a structured format (Apache Parquet) and makes the metadata accessible via the Amazon Glue Data Catalog. The tool is aimed at data scientists who would otherwise need to develop those structures for themselves. It supplements existing Segment connectors that convert data into formats for specific target systems. It’s free to current Segment clients.

Neustar is teaming with Google to provide Android mobile phone users with better information about who’s calling. The hope is that people will pick up more calls when they know who’s on the other end. Android phone will display who’s calling, confirmation of their identity, brand logos, and a reason for the call.