CDP Institute

It’s been said that the world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people and those who do not. Similarly, CDPs are often between those that focus on assembling customer profiles and those that also activate customer profiles. BlueConic has reinforced its position in the activate camp by adding features to migrate customers between lifecycle stages and define marketing messages appropriate to each stage. It’s a more-flexible alternative to standard campaign flows.

Jamie, the Senior Intern in our Department of the Obvious, was exceptionally excited by this report that auditors found Facebook decisions have caused “serious setbacks for civil rights”. At first we thought it was the news itself, but Jamie then explained it confirmed his belief that presenting the obvious is a valid career path. He can’t wait to tell his parents.

Facebook gets no sympathy because they make their own rules. But other publishers are also struggling against a tide of deceptive ads, political and otherwise. This GeoEdge survey found that 69% of publishers see a moderate or large number of deceptive ads each week and that 20% have lost viewers as a result of publishing them. Avoiding bad ads has its own risks: 49% said they inadvertently block non-deceptive ads often or very often.

CDP and messaging platform Blueshift reports on data from 14.9 billion messages sent through the system. They found that trigger-based email outperforms batch email by 497%, triggered push notifications outperform batch push by 1490%, and trigger campaigns using both channels are 283% more effective than single channel campaigns. No mention of campaign volumes, which are likely much smaller for triggered messages.

Personalization is another sure-fire way to improve campaign results. Reflektion found that personalization is marketers’ top ecommerce priority (55%) and that product recommendations are the most common type (69%). Although they wanted more personalization, marketers didn’t want more personalization systems: 65% said they currently use a single personalization vendor and 90% said they’d prefer to use just one.

Spending your budget on privacy tech instead of cool things like trigger campaigns and personalization? OneTrust is offering a collection of free tools for data mapping, data access requests, cookie consent, and more. That’s free as in free beer and if there are limits, I couldn’t find them listed.

Arm plans to spin off its IoT Services Group, which includes the Treasure Data CDP, into a separate company owned by SoftBank Group and its affiliates. SoftBank also owns Arm, so this is more a reshuffling than sale. It might make a future sale easier although no one has hinted that’s the plan.

Customer journey mapping is a hot space. It just got a bit hotter with a $2 million seed round for StrategyBox, a marketing analytics platform that builds journey maps. They use AI to recommend the most effective content, ads, and actions.

Mediafly is a sales enablement platform that mostly helps to build tailored interactive presentations. But they just spread their wings (get it?) with a content hub that marketers can use too. It’s another example of sales/marketing tech convergence if you want a bigger picture.

The News Gods are taking an extended holiday, which gives me a chance to cover technical news that rarely reaches the head of the queue. First up, Informatica has purchased metadata management tool Compact Solutions. Its superpower is extracting metadata by scanning everything from databases and applications to hand-coded scripts. How much fun is that?

Ok, you can probably think of several things more fun than finding metadata. I hope your list includes sharing data between systems, because Fivetran has a new managed service that makes it even easier to use its library of 150+ connectors. They maintain the connectors for their clients, so changes in source or target systems don’t require any adjustments by client IT staff. Lots of sales, marketing, and advertising systems on their list.

What’s that, you wish you didn’t have to manage any databases at all? Fauna is at your command with a serverless “data API” that lets you read, write, and manipulate data without worrying about the back-end details. Sounds crazy but we live in an age of wonders. They just raised $27 million, bringing their total to just under $60 million.