CDP Institute

Headless communications may sound like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, but it actually refers to the hot market for systems that provide services through API connections, letting users build their own interface. Nylas has just raised a $120 million Series C for headless communications APIs such as calendars, scheduling, and notification emails.

The virtual event market is another hot space, and no company is hotter than Hopin. The return of live events will probably cool things down a bit, so Hopin just hedged its bets by purchasing on-site event management vendor Boomset.

Tech bashing isn’t exactly a market, but it’s definitely a growth industry. WPP’s GroupM media agency is adding heat with a report that the top 25 media suppliers earn 67% of ad global revenue, up from 42% four years ago for the same companies. The better comparison would be the top 25 suppliers four years ago vs the top 25 today, but there’s no doubt that concentration is up.  Plenty more here on other aspects of the industry.

We’ll say it again: personalization does work.  ROI was over 4x for 71% of retailers who invested in personalized customer experience, according to this Netcore report.  Data gathering is a challenge, with barely half using cross-device and offline data (51%) or real-time behavioral data (49%).  Lots more here of interest.

Much as consumers like personalization, they’re still highly suspicious about data collection. Tinuiti found that 79% think their phone listens to their conversations and makes product recommendations based on what it hears. While 46% say apps track their activity to make their experience better, even more say they do it sell their data to other companies (51%), and a substantial minority say the real purpose is cyberstalking (24%), finding their political views (22%), telling “Big Brother” (18%) and reading their minds (18%). (Speaking of trust, I never received the promised... Read More >

Also speaking of trust, our friends at Facebook have announced plans to inject advertisements into virtual reality experiences on their Oculus mobile app.  What’s entertaining, and a bit pitiful, is that most of the announcement is devoted to explanations of how Facebook will absolutely, sincerely, and completely respect users’ privacy.  Raise your hand if you’re convinced.  (I saw that.)

It may not rank with to-may-toe vs to-mah-to, but surely someone cares whether it’s spelled “cookieless” or “cookie-less”. The consensus among press release writers seems to be hyphenless, so I’ll report that data quality measurement firm Neutronian has launched a program to certify that suppliers of marketing data have followed a cookieless recipe. The certification covers consent standards, opt-in/out processes, privacy and compliance disclosures, sourcing transparency, dataset characteristics, methodology and processing, and performance.

Adtech vendor Yieldmo has introduced a cookieless ad exchange, which classifies inventory based on a wide range of contextual signals including situation, topic, environment, and customer behavior.  Think of it as contextual targeting on steroids.  The good news according to Yieldmo is their approach lets publishers sell non-addressable inventory that would otherwise be undervalued.

Closing the cookieless loop, you can follow those cookieless ads to cookieless audiences with Contentsquare’s new cookieless analytics solution.  The magic here is Contentsquare’s detailed behavior analysis – down to mouse movements and screen touches – which enables marketers to understand customer intent without knowing their identities.  It’s a cookieless dream come true.