CDP Institute

Adobe announced closer integration of its content management system, Experience Manager, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. It follows other integrations announced over the past year. I wouldn’t even mention this except that everybody got all excited when Marketo announced it was using Microsoft Azure as its host. This is what a real partnership looks like, folks.

And since we’re talking about alliances, let’s note that Dun & Bradstreet announced its company data will now be available to Salesforce.com users via a Lightning Data app on the AppExchange. Users get real time data cleansing and enrichment. To put things in perspective, there are five other Lightning Data integrations including DataFox, HGData, Clearbit, Bombora, and MCH healthcare data.

The Marketing Technology Industry Council is a group of marketing executives from 27 B2B companies, united in their quest to solve top marketing challenges through “meticulous research and in-depth, expert studies”.

Don’t get me wrong: I think research can be great.

Of course, few pieces of research are more fascinating than what your competitors are up to. Market intelligence aggregator Crayon scans the Web for news, marketing campaigns, Web site changes, customer reviews and support requests, and such, and then shares the bits that seem important. They’ve just launched a free tool that gives daily digests of competitors’ marketing efforts.

Location data reveals more than where you are. Factual, which has a proprietary dataset of more than 130 million businesses and points of interest around the world, has released a mobile SDK that looks at things like business operating hours, speed and direction of travel, and device usage patterns to infer the situation of each user. The SDK lets mobile apps use the information to tailor their offers or other actions.

One major use for location data is measuring the impact of online advertising by connecting it with subsequent retail store visits.

We live in crass times but the folks at location intelligence company Cuebiq are at least trying to use their data for non-commercial purposes. They just launched a “Data for Good” initiative that makes anonymous location information available to universities and other nonprofit organizations for things like improving quality of life and natural disaster response. Cuebiq gathers data on 61 million monthly active U.S. smartphone users through over 180 mobile apps.

Optimove, which selects customer treatments based on movement between lifecycle stages, has expanded its scope to include acquisitions as well as existing customers. The new feature uses look-alike modeling to assign new Web site visitors to segments and then selects the most appropriate treatment for each segment. The company says that combining acquisition and retention marketing will yield an average 25% lift in conversion rates. If you’re keeping track: Optimove builds a unified, accessible, persistent customer database, making them a Customer Data Platform.

Ah, but how to find the right message for each segment?  Facebook has a new feature that automatically tests different combinations of ad images, videos, and text to find which versions appeal to different segments and placements (News Feed, Instagram, and Audience Network). Specialists like RevJet have been doing this for some time but adoption by Facebook means much broader adoption.

The next step beyond automatically combining ad components is automatically creating them from scratch. Persado has been doing that for years for advertising text. They recently added the ability to create emotional profiles for individual customers and tailor ad language to those profiles. They also announced another $30 million in bank financing, on top of $66 million in previous equity funding. Someone’s emotional state = excited.

Remember when Walmart was the evil empire destroying small businesses across America? Today the $500 billion behemoth has somehow morphed into a spunky underdog fighting Amazon.com ($136 billion revenue). One dimension to the duel is pricing, where Amazon continues to undercut Walmart’s core promise of being cheaper than anyone else. This new study from Profitero finds that Amazon underpriced Walmart in 12 of 13 categories, although the average difference is just 3%. Walmart still beats the prices of other retailers.