CDP Institute

Consumers are underwhelmed by what they get for the data they already share: in this survey from identity management vendor Janrain, just 18% said online ads “often” seem to understand what they want while although 47% offered a grudging “sometimes”.

Vendor alliances are rarely worth mentioning but we’ll make an exception for news that visual recognition expert Clarifai is working with personalization vendor RichRelevance to create a suite of visually-based personalization tools. Use of visual inputs in marketing qualifies as an Important Trend.

Here’s more AI news worth knowing. Email deliverability expert Return Path has launched a tool lets marketers mail their most engaged subscribers early in a campaign, which will yield higher engagement rates that in turn lead to greater acceptance by inbox filters. It can also temporarily suppress mail to fatigued subscribers, lest they get annoyed or unsubscribe entirely.

Finally, we have a $10 million Series A funding for privacy management platform WireWheel, bringing total funding to $13 million. WireWheel automates privacy challenges including finding personal information in company systems, mapping processes that use that data, and alerting users to questionable events. Other tools provide documentation, frameworks, and collaboration. Given the complexities of privacy management, it’s important to know that companies like WireWheel can help.

If Adobe’s $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento failed to get you thinking about open source systems, then IBM’s $34 billion deal for Red Hat surely did. So maybe you’ll be interested in open source CRM vendor X2Engine’s release of an enhanced marketing automation layer. The X2 platform includes marketing, sales, service, digital, quotes, social monitoring, collaboration, and document management. Prices start at $35 per month per user and they claim more than 40,000 deployments worldwide.

Retail systems vendor CitiXsys has also built marketing into a larger suite, which also includes point of sale, ecommerce, inventory, fulfillment, loyalty, pricing, and promotion management functions. This sort of integration is convenient but it limits users to whatever features the vendor builds into each application. CitiXsys just raised a $20 Series B.

Tech product distributor Ingram Micro hasn’t yet created a full-scope software suite, but it did just launch a marketing application for its channel partners. That marketing applications are well enough understood for Ingram Micro to build one is another sign of market maturity.

Here’s a disconcerting new trend: IT departments admitting they’re doing a poor job. Not what you want to hear from people we rely on. Let start with a survey from anti-virus expert Kaspersky Lab, which found that 84% of North American chief information security officers believe cybersecurity breaches are inevitable. Too many attackers and too little budget, they say. Somehow this doesn’t seem the best way to motivate management to give you more money.

Ok, security chiefs are professional worriers. But IT folks are at least supposed to geek out on new tech, right? Then explain why 74% of CIOs told performance monitoring vendor Dynatrace that they expect Internet of Things to cause performance problems that significantly damage revenues. They fear their organizations will roll out complex systems without adequate planning. As if to prove the point, the link to the study didn’t work when first published. Nice touch.

If companies can’t run their systems or keep their data safe, getting consent to use customer data almost seems irrelevant.

CDP and personalization vendor Evergage has expanded its machine learning powers with Contextual Bandit, an algorithm that considers response value as well as probability when picking the best offer for each individual. The company also added a Data Science Workbench that provides a data analysis toolkit and direct access to the detailed data in Evergage’s unified customer profiles.

Building unified profiles with a company’s own customer data isn’t easy, but it’s a walk in the park compared with matching identities across advertising channels. And that’s getting harder as cookies become less available. Cross-device identity vendor Screen6 has launched a new server-to-server ID synching solution that builds private matching tables between partners without relying on cookies. This lets it extend to environments like connected TVs and Internet of Things, where cookies were never on the menu.