CDP Institute

The CDP Institute has launched CDP Institute Europe to help European marketers. The new operation identifies CDP vendors who are active in Europe and will provide supporting services such as speakers. It is being launched with presentations in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Analytics-focused CDP Datorama has added an AI-driven tool to automatically create dashboards that analyze stand-alone data files. The new tool, LiteConnect, is available to users of Datorama’s core product, which unifies data from multiple sources and provides visualizations, alerts, and feeds to other systems.

Facebook was shocked shocked to learn that its data was used to help the Trump campaign in 2016, according to news reports. A survey app allowed researchers affiliated with political data firm Cambridge Analytica to gather data on 270,000 respondents and, without their permission, more than 50 million members of their networks. Facebook subsequently demanded that the data be deleted but apparently did nothing to ensure this happened. Politicians in the U.S. and UK are demanding investigations.

This notion of consumers selling their own data just won’t go away. This newsletter has covered several vendors and our sister blog Customer Experience Matrix recently took a deeper look. Now here’s a MarTech piece announcing yet another product, from SRAX, and casually mentioning two others, Datum and Data Wallet. As the Customer Experience Matrix piece shows, business models vary considerably and many of these are more about building advertising audiences than paying people for their data.  Seller beware.

Digital2Go Media Network captures location data from mobile devices via mobile apps. It sells the data and can also send targeted messages. Its press release says it compensates mobile device users for sharing their information but doesn’t provide details. The Web site doesn’t mention such payments at all. They are working with the NEM blockchain / cryptocurrency, which just raised the crypto-equivalent of $1 million for them.

oneAudience also builds profiles of mobile device users with data collected from partners and sells the result for advertising and analytics. No mention of compensating the individual users. They just made their data available through Adobe Audience Manager.

Let’s give you some product news today, Dear Reader, because we know you like it. Salesforce has announced versions of its Sales and Service cloud products tailored for small business. Price is $25 per user per month, which is the same as their previous lowest tier. It’s not clear what’s different.

Web content management and ecommerce vendor Episerver has added a module for AI-driven content selection. It complements the system’s existing on-site search, product recommendations, event-triggered messaging, and email personalization capabilities. The new module can pick the best sequence of content for each individual over time.

I couldn’t find any other product news worth mentioning, so here’s some “anti-product news” instead: programmatic software vendor Centro found that 51% of marketers and 30% of agencies feel they have too many tools already. Most work with more than a dozen ad tech tools and routinely use several tools that do the same thing. You won’t be surprised that unified measurement and data integration are major pain points.

Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.

By coincidence, we have an announcement from dynamic content generator Movable Ink and automated content creator Persado that they’ve partnered on a system to generate and test multiple versions of emails. Kinda like one of those chocolate-meets-peanut butter commercials. Results come from real promotions, not a survey panel. Of course, it’s much easier to test in email than print mail.