CDP Institute

It looks like personal data ownership will be the surprise winner over blockchain as the most-hyped topic of 2018.

In practice, personal data monetization and blockchain go hand-in-hand. It almost isn’t worth mentioning each new scheme, but if you’re keeping track (or playing an esoteric drinking game), here’s an announcement from PDATA, a personal data marketplace that lets consumers sell their data directly to companies and get paid in PDATA tokens. Like many entrants into this market, PDATA is still in late planning stages, with token sales set to begin in 10 days. But it’s based on an existing app, a customer feedback system called Opiria.

The focus on monetizing personal data arguably misses the point, which is that consumers want to control the data itself. Sovrin Foundation uses blockchain to give users a self-controlled credential to verify their identity in digital signatures. It conceives of itself as a “global public utility”. Cool. The Foundation just announced support from IBM, which joins a number of other, much smaller “founding stewards”.

Life has many mysteries, and the impact of TV advertising ranks high among them. TVSquared shines a light into this dark corner by correlating ad broadcasts with customer response through phone, apps, mobile, Web, and SMS. They just raised $8 million, bringing total funding to $21 million.

Also plumbing the ineffable, digital experience agency Decibel recently launched “Digital Experience Intelligence Platform” that automatically examines a company’s digital experiences and provides a handy experience score for each interaction type. It gives businesses an objective way to identify and rank user experiences.

A less vexing mystery – at about the level of why you park in a driveway and drive on a parkway – is why credit card companies need a signature for in-person charges but not those taken online or by phone. Mastercard has resolved that conundrum by no longer requiring signatures at all. Fun fact: according to Mastercard, nearly one in five Americans can’t recall the last time they used their signature for anything else.

So far, Alexa ignores me when I ask her to write this newsletter. But smart speakers are already having a huge impact elsewhere. UK-based content marketing agency Delineate found that 24% of U.S. households have a smart speaker and 54% of smart speaker owners have used them for shopping.

The obvious problem with voice shopping is you can’t see your choices. Connekt addresses this by enabling smart devices to make purchases of items being shown on TV. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents said they’d buy that way. Connekt reported a 25% ownership rate for voice devices, similar to Delineate, but found only 8% of owners had made a purchase through it.

But buying through the smart device is just part of the story. Marketing platform vendor SmarterHQ found that 90% of buyers shop across multiple channels, often combining online research with in-store purchases. Making the journey still more fragmented, 53% of respondents had more than three Internet-connected devices. SmarterHQ notes that this reinforces the importance of cross-channel identity resolution. Sounds like a job for a CDP.

We’ve definitely entered the piling on stage of complaints about Facebook.

Along the same lines, Sprout Social sent an email headlined “27% of consumers’ opinion of social media has declined” although the underlying report found 27% had a lower opinion of social advertising. Not the same at all. They also found people were more interested in seeing ads from brands (57%) than influencers (43%), which they said reflected a new demand for honesty. Perhaps.

The unifying thread in all this is the value of personal data. Research Intelligencer did some fascinating (to me) research that found most people would consider a rate below minimum wage to be fair pay for time spent viewing ads. The article links to another study that found advertisers actually pay under $3 per hour of consumer time. Equally fascinating (or not).