CDP Institute

It’s beginning to look like access to customer data is as valuable as access to the customers themselves. Springbot, which provides marketing automation to small ecommerce companies, has set up a co-op to let its clients pool anonymous customer profiles and send campaigns to look-alikes of their own customer lists. Springbot sends the campaigns, so retailers only get information about responders. Springbot collects its clients’ data through integration siwth Big Commerce, Magento, and Shopify.

B2B predictive analytics vendor 6sense assembles its own data by scanning public and private sources for buying signals. It just added a campaign execution engine to deliver advertising and email messages to the opportunities it uncovers. This is a significant extension for 6sense, which previously fed scored leads and segments to external marketing and sales systems for execution. As marketing execution systems like Salesforce and Adobe expand their AI features, 6sense’s data becomes a more important differentiator.

GDPR is the granddaddy of all data access stories.

Adobe yesterday announced a unified customer profile that includes data from outside the Adobe Cloud products. Data is mapped using Experience Data Models (an open source data language created by Adobe) and available in real time to any system that speaks that language. This related blog post from Adobe says the unified data is loaded into a persistent Adobe Cloud Platform database on Microsoft Azure and that identities are matched across systems. It supports GDPR requirements too. Impressive and very much in line with the CDP approach.

Also at the Adobe Summit, data integration vendor SnapLogic announced connectors to load data into the Adobe Cloud Platform using Experience Data Models. Adobe’s own press release mentions similar connectors from Informatica and TMMData.

Adobe’s master press release also casually mentioned general availability of their Device Co-op, originally announced two years ago. The Co-op lets Adobe Analytics Cloud customers pool deterministic device matches to create a shared master set of matches. In a newly privacy-conscious world, perhaps a quiet announcement was best. But if other sources of cross-device matches are limited by GDPR and other changes, Adobe’s large customer base could make its Co-op an important alternative. Details here on how the Co-op works.

As the GDPR effective date looms ever closer, we see companies taking a more nuanced view of compliance.

And the Facebook backlash continues. IPhoto digitization app vendor ScanMyPhotos saw fit not just to advise people to delete their photos from Facebook, but to issue a press release about the suggestion. Maybe it’s just a way to get attention by piggybacking on the news, but they also presumably feel it’s useful to be seen as pro-privacy.

ScanMyPhotos isn’t alone in taking a position on public issues: OnBrand Magazine found that 79% of marketing decision-makers are including social and cultural issues in their 2018 strategies and 36% are excited to explore brand activism.

Mobile-oriented CDP mParticle has added the ability to display the complete record of an individual customer, including attributes and behaviors. It’s the sort of thing a sales person or customer service agent might use. It shows that mParticle, like other CDPs, is extending beyond data management.

Are you trapped in a bizarre alternate universe where this newsletter is your only source of information?

Hopefully you don’t need convincing that marketers should be honest about how they use customer data. But if you do need a little push, here’s a Harvard Business Review study that found recommendations including an explanation of the data used (“based on your clicks on our site” or “based on what you’ve shared with us”) had higher click and spending rates than recommendations that didn’t describe their basis. Bonus: the paper includes some sound advice for using personal data wisely.