CDP Institute

CDP Optimove has launched a new feature to compare the long-term performance of different communication streams over time. Each test stream can include messages across in multiple channels. No prize for guessing that the product name is Streams.

Also at NRF: retail customer data expert dunnhumby has launched a media business that lets retailers sell advertising on in-store signage, point of sale screens, and similar “owned” channels. It will also manage campaigns in conventional channels. In-store media networks are nothing new but it’s still a good way to leverage dunnhumby’s customer data skills.

You were somewhat interested in last week’s news that Akamai had purchased identity access management vendor Janrain, Dear Reader. So maybe you’d like to know that Janrain competitor OneLogin has raised a nice round $100 million. Now you do.

And if anyone still doubts that we’ve passed Peak Facebook, investment management firm Cowen has estimated the Facebook’s share of digital ad spending will fall from 20% in 2018 to 17% in 2020.  Amazon will double its share from 6% to 12%. But Facebook-owned Instagram is expected to also gain 2 percentage points, so don’t feel too badly for them.

Stand-alone digital voice assistants like Amazon Echo will replace smartphones as the dominant consumer home device, predicts an Accenture report. The network effect is alive and well: 93% of voice assistant owners say they’ll look for other devices that easily integrate with them. A majority (57%) of voice assistant owners say they use their smartphones less.

When Arm Holdings purchased the Treasure Data CDP last year, they said they would use it to combine Internet of Things data with conventional customer data. Sure enough, Arm has released a retail solution that integrates Treasure Data with Arm’s Pelion IoT device management platform. The solution will make it easier to to target individual-level messages in real time. It will also feed Reflexis ONE, an Arm partner that recommends real-time actions to store associates.

IoT is one reason that location data has become more available. In fact, there’s so much of it that HERE Technologies has created a marketplace to buy, trade, and sell it. The idea is to make it easier to develop location-based applications and to monetize existing location data. Worried about privacy? HERE argues owners have tighter control over data sold within the exchange than data sold elsewhere.

One big use for location data is targeted outdoor advertising. Which finally lets me mention this month-old news that start-up Firefly has raised $21.5 million for “remotely programmable geotargeted ads” on the roof of rideshare cars. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we wrote about last summer about Grabb-it, which puts geotargeted ads in car windows.

It’s another brutally slow news day, so I’m reduced to reporting that Mapp, the private equity-owned mashup of Blue Hornet email and several marketing products once owned by Teradata, has rebranded itself by calling marketers “sheep”. So clever. Mapp says it’s a “native CDP”, which seems to mean it has a unified customer database. It’s not clear that Mapp also meets the CDP requirement of easily sharing data with external products.

Slightly more substantial: shopper marketing firm Catalina has given the world yet another digital-to-retail attribution solution. Catalina’s special twist is measuring results down to the item level (you’ll recall they collect purchase data from loyalty programs). They connect purchases to media by having marketers apply tracking pixels to their ads, which Catalina links to 390 million devices and their owners.

Further afield: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has spent $103 million to acquire Berlin-based open source data tech vendor Data Artisans. It’s interesting on several levels: Alibaba doing a deal in Europe; Alibaba competing with Amazon in cloud services; and another big deal for open source tech. Plenty for all you sheep to chew on.

Back to surveys. At least this one from email company Yes Marketing is interesting. Turns out that irrelevant product recommendations are the second-most-common reason for not opening email (50%), after too many emails (55%). Over-personalization “creeps me out” (12%) outweighs lack of personalization (11%). In other words, consumer demand personalization is greatly exaggerated – and poor personalization is hurts more than no personalization at all.