CDP Institute

Social media’s influence is a matter of trust as well as time. Separate studies by research agency Kantar and native ad content vendor Sharethrough found that social media is less far trusted than traditional publishers as a news source. Not surprising but you can’t take anything for granted these days.

And what about loyalty?

Customer Data Platform vendor BlueVenn announced a strategic partnership with Throtle, which helps companies connect online to offline identities. What’s interesting is such integrations have usually been done as clients request them; this makes the integration more part of BlueVenn’s standard offering.

B2B data company Madison Logic has also made it easier for clients to access external data. They’ve recently exposed data and analytics from their ActivateABM marketing platform to CRM systems, where individual salespeople can see them.

Publishers are using third party data to supplement their own information. Location data compiler Factual and Digiday found that 85% of publishers buy third party data, primarily to extend the scale of their own information. They also found that geotargeteing is now mainstream: 76% of publishers usually or always do it.

We’re seeing a new round of scare headlines as companies realize they’re not ready for GDPR, the strict European Union privacy regulations that go into effect next May. It’s an opportunity for Customer Data Platform vendors, whose solutions can help companies meet GDPR requirements to show data they’re storing about consumers  and allow changes or deletions. Segment has just announced new capabilities to do this; so have others including Fospha, RedEye, BlueVenn (all UK-based), Tealium, and mParticle.

This newsletter has written more about GDPR than our readers wanted to see.

One of the problems with taking humans out of the media buying process is that ad fraud and brand safety problems can go undetected. Programmatic ad platform RhythmOne reports it blocked just over one-third of all potential inventory due to fraud or performance concerns last June – September.  Rates are similar with previous periods but better options are emerging: fraud is lower on mobile app inventory than desktops; private marketplaces offer higher quality options; and ads.txt is helping to prevent unauthorized selling by fraudsters.

Nearly half (45%) of consumers expect their email or social media accounts to be hacked in the coming year, according to a survey by PwC and BAV Group.

Sadly, consumer concerns about security are well founded. The 2017 U.S. State of Cybercrime survey, taken by CSO Magazine, Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Secret Service, and Forcepoint, found that 39% of security managers said the frequency of cybersecurity events has increased and the average number of days before problems are detected rose from 58 in 2015 to 92 in 2017. The average at large enterprises was 138 days – that’s four months for the math-impaired.

And if you don’t have enough to worry about, it turns out your vacuum machine could be spying on you too. Researchers at Check Point, who are paid to try such things, found they could hack into the camera on a Wi-Fi connected LG vacuum robot, despite sophisticated anti-hacking defenses employed by the manufacturer. Their point may be undercut by a video illustrating the hack: while intended to be ominous, it seemed to show the main risk is the world learning whether you have dust bunnies.

Among my many pet peeves are vendor claims to have the first or only product in a market. Today’s news items are important even though they’re not as unique as promised. We’ll start with Panoply, which has just released its “smart cloud data warehouse” from beta. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically enrich, transform, and optimize complex data. That’s really important, since those tasks are major obstacles to customer data unification. So important, in fact, that we also wrote last week about Qubole’s similar-sounding product.