CDP Institute

U.S. firms will spend more than $10 billion on third party audience data in 2017, according to a Winterberry Group study for the IAB and Data & Marketing Association (DMA). The study found another $10.1 billion will be spent on related services. The report breaks down the spending by data and service type.

We’re all about money today. Open source artificial intelligence vendor H2O.ai announced a $40 million Series C, making total investment $73.6 million. The firm provides machine learning tools for data scientists and non-technical users. It says more than 12,000 companies and 129,000 individuals have downloaded its software.

You weren’t that interested last week in many of the surveys we covered. But I’ll try again today with a few that I find exceptionally useful. First comes from RSR Research and takes a close look at customer engagement strategies and technologies for retailers. It provides lots of details and especially interesting comparison between responses of successful and not-so-successful companies. Spoiler alert: winners for on customer engagement; laggards focus on financial metrics.

This survey from Monetate limits its focus to personalization, but extends beyond retail to include financial services and travel and hospitality (with separate data for each). It also gives lots of details about technologies, marketing methods, data sources, channels, buying intentions, obstacles, and much else. Key finding: companies with formal plans and financial incentives for personalization are more likely to have rising profits than those that don’t. Also, North American marketers are significantly ahead of UK marketers in personalization deployment.

This study from digital agency Isobar, a Dentsu subsidiary, isn’t a survey but it presents some exceptionally fresh insights into the future of business and technology. It’s not just AI – in fact, the most interesting changes will be how humans engage with the real world (and each other).

You haven’t been very interested in surveys this week, so let’s switch to product news. CDP vendor Tealium has received SOC 2 Type II certification for its data security practices, which means its internal controls have been independently audited and meet established standards. Many security-conscious organizations require SOC 2 certification by their suppliers.

Swrve, a customer engagement system for mobile apps, has added connectors for streaming video platforms including Apply TV, Roku, Adroid TV, and Amazon Fire TV. The connectors can capture customer behaviors from those systems and can send messages through them. Swrve already has connectors for major email, SMS, marketing automation, and attributions systems. It builds and expose a unified customer database, so you could call it a CDP, although it’s not a term they use.

More on mobile: app monetization and marketing company ironSource has launched “4D Interactive Ads”, which let users make “choose your own adventure”-style choices within an advertisement. Choices determine what’s shown next and are recorded by the advertiser, making this a clever way to capture customer information in a format that doesn’t usually allow that.

We seem to have a “customer behavior” theme this week. I don’t know why but let’s go with it. A study from marketing services consultancy Lavidge finds that tech buyers rely most on colleagues and friends, search engines, and vendor Web sites as data sources during product discovery, while paying less attention to case studies, industry reports, blogs, and advertising in general. No prizes for guessing that cold call telemarketing is the least favorite of all.

The Lavidge survey covered managers in many departments. Engineers are a different breed altogether. True to stereotype, this survey from IEEE GlobalSpec and TREW marketing finds engineers’ favorite information sources are just-the-facts case studies, ebooks, and white papers. Speaking of stereotypes, do engineers lack social skills? I’d never say that, but the survey found 64% of engineers get information from Web research while 13% ask their colleagues. In the Lavidge study, 52% cited colleagues and 34% preferred Web sites. Just the facts.

But really effective marketing is cross-channel anyway, right? A survey from cross-channel personalization vendor Braze (formerly AppBoy), found that mobile app customers who received only email messages showed a 45% increase in engagement (vs customers sent no messages), but customers who received email, push and in-app messages showed a 543% increase. (Okay, this item doesn’t really relate to the previous two. I do the best I can.)

IOTA is a distributed ledger (blockchain) system with no transaction fees. If that’s not enough to get you excited, how about this: they’ve just launched a pilot version of a data marketplace that will let owners sell data streams, mostly from Internet of Things devices. Whoa Nelly, eh? In theory, people could sell personal data streams too. The “no transaction fee” part of IOTA makes it all possible, since otherwise the transaction fees would make micropayments for data impractical.