CDP Institute

Tealium announced general availability of its automated predictive feature, Predict ML, which it originally revealed last fall. The system can automatically build a model to predict any behavior tracked in the Tealium CDP. It also warns users if inadequate data is available to build a reliable model.

Microsoft hasn’t quite released its Digital Marketing Center, which helps small businesses manage social postings, paid social, and paid search campaigns across Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But it’s moving from very limited pilot to less limited pilot. The pilots are free although we don’t know pricing for the final product.

Microsoft is also on the list of companies joining the #StopHateForProfit Facebook advertising boycott, along with HP, Ford, Honda, Unilever, BestBuy, Denny’s, Pepsi, Hersey, Clorox, and others. The coalition of civil rights organizations behind the boycott rejected adjustments offered by Facebook on Friday and listed demands for substantive changes in policies that foster extremism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration illustrated its own commitment to free speech by suggesting that Facebook and other social platforms suppress messages from protesters. Oh, and Twitch temporarily suspended Trump from its platform. Busy day.

We’ve already written a couple of times about Salesforce products that help businesses adapt to the pandemic, so I’m reluctant to cover them again. On the other hand, I see few other enterprise software vendors stepping up. So here’s the latest: Salesforce Anywhere, a collection of tools to support work-from-home activities for sales, service and marketing. Some are available now and most will be released over the next few months.

Smaller vendors tend to be more agile. Here’s news of an all-in-one online events platform, which couldn’t be more timely. Vendor is UK-based startup Hopin. They just raised a €35.6 million ($40 million) Series A.

You probably suspected as much, but this Calabrio study confirms that contact centers have largely switched to remote work and 72% of agents are happy with the switch. Less obvious: 72% of managers are satisfied with remote worker productivity. Slightly fewer (63%) expect the pandemic’s impact on customer service will be permanent.

Citizen developers have a new brick to hurl through IT department windows, provided by none other than Amazon Web Services. Honeycode, just launched in beta, is a new AWS managed service that lets users build mobile and Web apps with a spreadsheet-style interface. And you IT people thought AWS was your friend.

Quick: who’s the leading cross-channel marketing cloud platform? If you didn’t say Knorex, you haven’t read their press release. Puffery notwithstanding, they’ve just launched an intriguing AI engine that powers many steps of digital ad management, including cross-channel budget optimization, programmatic bidding, contextual targeting, and campaign strategy recommendation.

Pattern89 also uses AI to guide advertising, although it limits its focus to optimizing creative elements within social ad campaigns. They just launched an enhancement that simulates ad performance before campaigns actually run. The system measures more than 49,000 attributes of images, videos, copy, and ad formats.

Segment has just issued another report on what its customers are up to. Most common uses are collecting Web and mobile analytics (28%), measuring Web site conversions (17%), and integrating new analytical and marketing tools without engineering support (11%). Real-time personalized email and notifications clock in at 10%. Most intriguing, given that Segment concentrates on assembling customer data, is nearly one-quarter (24%) of Segment users are in marketing, sales, analytics, and product teams. The largest group is still engineering at 49%.

Dun & Bradstreet announced pricing for its planned Initial Public offering, at a range that values the company around $8 billion. You may recall that private investors bought the then-public firm for $5.4 billion in August 2018. Not bad.

Death of the third-party data business is clearly exaggerated. Here’s one more proof: email data provider Webbula is adding near-real-time purchase intent data to its consumer audience segments.