CDP Institute

I’ve long doubted that serious data privacy regulation will happen in the U.S. It seems that some pretty big businesses agree: according to this story, Verizon is merrily planning to combine online and offline data on its subscribers to allow ad targeting on par with Google and Facebook. If there were much chance for a backlash against data collection, this would be bad news for companies building their own customer databases. But chances are slim.

This story caught my eye because it’s about consumers gathering data about companies, instead of the other way around. Man bites dog, as it were. In this case, consumers are sharing grocery store price and availability information through a new company called Basket. One of the co-founders was an early employee at Waze, which is based on crowd-sourcing traffic information.

I’d love to have made “the customer strikes back” into a theme for the day, but those stories are hard to find.

Let’s look at empowerment from a different angle.

You may think of Episerver as a Web content management system, if you think of them at all.

Here’s a pretty standard acquisition story, but the company being bought is named Little Bird so we can think of it as part of a Thanksgiving theme. Little Bird helps brands find social influences and build communities. The buyer is Sprinklr, an enterprise social media management platform. You might say they gobbled them up.

Speaking of acquisitions, GE Digital recently spent $915 million to buy cloud-based field service technology company ServiceMax, $153 million for Internet of Things data integration specialist Bit Stew, and an undisclosed amount for machine learning expert Wise.io. This is all intended to build its equipment monitoring business but if you don’t think equipment data can be transformed into customer insights, you might want to think again.

Many marketers are confused about the difference between Customer Data Platforms and Data Management Platforms.

I didn’t have space earlier this week to mention Tapad’s announcement that its probabilistic device identities are now available for targeting through LiveRamp. But LiveRamp showed up again in yesterday’s news by acquiring Arbor and Circulate, which both build deterministic device identities and user profiles while selling ads on publisher Web sites. So we see that LiveRamp continues to push hard at expanding its identity resolution business.

Been spending a lot on content, have you? How do you feel to learn that 90% of the engagement goes to just 5% of the items? And that consumption hasn’t increased even though companies are spending 50% more on content creation? Marketing performance measurement vendor Beckon provides these and other sobering facts in a new survey.

Origami Logic gathers a ton of marketing data for performance measurement. But it doesn’t work at the individual customer level, so it’s not a customer data platform. With hair-thin light gray type on a white background, its Web site may set a world record for illegibility. Just saying.

Yes, it’s come to this: robots are watching TV for you. iQ Media, whose business is monitoring media to track coverage for marketing and public relations teams, is using super-smart logo-recognition and spoken word-detection technology to track visual and aural mentions of brands. In real time, no less. Did I mention they have a library of 22 million hours of TV recorded over the past six years?