CDP Institute

Ok, Dear Reader, I know you’re not always interested in surveys but here are some that are exceptionally deep. First, Evergage dives into personalization and finds that 88% of marketers think their customers expect it but just 31% think marketers get it right. A solid 87% report personalization has generated a measureable lift in results. Good detail here on channels, data sources, obstacles, and such. Best factoid: the proportion thinking personalization should be a high priority has grown from 64% in 2016 to 77% in 2018.

Drilling further, digital experience platform e-Spirit finds just 26% of companies can currently deliver personalized experiences in real time. They find huge differences between leaders and laggards in cross-channel content distribution, system integration, and more. Factoid: just 25% of companies use 60% or more of their existing digital experience systems.

Finally, Korn Ferry reports that CMOs feel analytics and personalization are the functions they most need to improve, but organizational alignment is the biggest obstacle to being effective. Another conundrum: 52% say they can’t connect marketing activities to company performance but 45% say their bonus is driven by financial results. For all the talk about customer experience, just 13% say customer satisfaction is the most important factor in their bonus and only 12% cite brand health.

Grapeshot calls itself a ‘contextual intelligence platform’, which could mean just about anything. What they really do is analyze and classify Web page content. The main application these days is brand safety – that is, avoiding placing ads on pages with objectionable messages. Oracle just bought them for an undisclosed amount.

Uberflip calls itself a ‘content experience platform’, another ambiguous label that in their case means they help marketers present their existing content in collections optimized for different audiences. They just raised a $32 million Series A, bringing total funding to $35.9 million.

Since Web content seems to be today’s theme, let’s round it out with news that IAB Europe and IAB Technology Laboratory have released a framework for publishers to gather visitor consent for sharing their data with third parties. If I’m reading it correctly, a Web site pop-up would let visitors specify which from a list of third parties can have their information. It will take some pretty great marketing to make that work. Some European publishers have already signed on but we’ll see how others react.

Remember AI? It’s gone from exciting to background noise. But important things keep happening. For example, here’s an integration that embeds AI-generated email subject lines from Persado in emails sent by Listrak. It’s exactly the sort of friction elimination that will embed unnoticed AI in everything. Which is just as the machines want it.

Qordoba also has an AI that understands human response to text. It helps product development teams score the emotional tone of the words embedded in user experiences. They argue that UX designers have largely overlooked text to focus on other aspects of design. Interesting.

And here’s IDenTV, which uses AI to identify faces, objects, logos, scenes, and activities within videos. It stores them as metadata so the videos can be searched, analyzed and used to train other AIs. You read that right: the machines are making other machines smarter.

Customer experience is a priority at 95% of companies and a top priority at 57% of companies surveyed by Winterberry Group for the Data & Marketing Association (DMA). The top reason was customer expectations for personalization, cited by 72%. What’s really interesting here is detail on marketer priorities: for example, 62% rate segmentation as the top priority within campaign management, compared with 54% for customer journey mapping and 39% for trigger-based communications.

Are personalization efforts successful? Not so much as marketers think: Adobe’s 2018 State of Digital Advertising survey found while 74% of marketers believe they’re serving relevant ads, just 35% of consumers agree. Most of the study is about media trends – the hot new channel is push notifications, if you were wondering.

Is personalization as important as marketers think? When customer care vendor Narvar asked retail shoppers why they’d give a retailer repeat business, 77% cited fast shipping on replacements for lost or damaged items, 69% said quick refunds on returns, 54% mentioned an accurate delivery date promise…and just 25% cited a personalized experience. Of course, marketers always don’t control those operational practices. But maybe they should try.