CDP Institute

If you just can’t wait to sell your personal data, the good folks at Dabbl have already opened a “trustworthy attention marketplace” that pays consumers for interacting with brand advertising. As Dabbl points out, it gives consumers “something smart and satisfying to do in their downtime” on their smartphone. No wasted time talking to Mom or seeing what Sean had for lunch.

Is there anyone left who’d rather keep their personal data private? Yes, but a minority according to an Oracle survey of 15,000 consumers. They found 29% felt offers based on social media data are “creepy”, while 50% would be attracted to personalized offers based on loyalty data, purchase data, and real-time browsing behavior. Other things they found creepy: delivery drones (26%), automatic grocery replenishment (33%), and robot assistance in a dressing room (39%).

Sometimes what companies do is less interesting than how they choose to present it. For example, Jumpshot tracks consumer behavior with a global panel of 100 million devices. They’ve chosen to describe that as a way to “unlock walled-garden data” so marketers can connect ad exposures to behaviors inside walled garden domains like Amazon and Google. They’re also positioning themselves as a campaign optimization solution, another hot topic. Two trends for the price of one.

Along the same lines: automated machine learning vendor DataRobot chose to headline its latest product enhancements as “human-interpretable AI”. They’ve noticed that people want AI systems to explain for their decisions, something that doesn’t come naturally.  If you’re really paranoid, you’ll wonder whether AI will give true explanations or just whatever it learns is most likely to get its decisions accepted.

Companies position themselves to investors as well as buyers. Business software discovery portal Crozdesk found the hottest funding categories are now financial technology (yes, “fintech”) and analytics, including AI and Big Data. Funding dropped for former leaders including advertising, sales, and marketing (one category) and CRM. Also hot: integration as a service that lets “citizen integrators” to connect systems for themselves and products for specific industries (vertical solutions) rather than generic (horitzontal) solutions. Quite intriguing if you’re into this sort of thing.

Fabled magazine publisher Time Inc. is being bought by slightly-less-fabled publisher Meredith Corporation for $2.8 billion cash. The $18.50 share price is a 46% premium over the stock’s recent level but well under the $25.95 all-time high in 2015. Meredith’s investment is supported by $650 million from the arch-conservative Koch brothers, who promise no involvement in editorial decisions. Sure.

Time Inc. owns some digital properties, including online advertising and identity aggregator Viant.

All that growth doesn’t mean marketers are doing a great job managing their money. A study from ID Comms found that just 15% of advertisers say they’re using media technology effectively, even though 75% agree they need a clear adtech strategy. Good news for some of us: specialist tech consultants are the most trusted adtech advisors.

I had intended to focus on good news today, in the Thanksgiving Spirit and all that.

Of course, those brand values don’t do anything for consumers.

But let’s end on a positive note: three firms that I classify as Customer Data Platforms made it onto the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list issued last week. They were Datorama (ranked 35 with 5,149% growth rate), Signal (rank 193 with 548% growth rate), and Tealium (rank 195 with 538% growth rate). Congratulations to them and happy Thanksgiving to all.

It’s not your imagination: the online audience aggregators (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) really are coming under unprecedented pressure. It’s not just lagging indicators like the New York Times finally noticing there’s a problem, Verto Analytics, which gathers behavior from measurement apps on consumer devices, found that Facebook time fell 32.7 hours per month in 2016 to 18.5 hours in 2017. Other social media services showed growth. Let’s face it: attention spans are short and people are not as obsessed with Facebook as they used to be.