Real-time data used to be rare and expensive, used mostly for advanced operational processes such as airline ticket sales. Today, 78% of tech leaders say it’s a “must-have” and 71% can tie it to revenue growth, according to this DataStax survey. Personalization is the second-most common real-time use case, after monitoring internal IT activity.
This newsletter generally avoids writing about rumors, but the marketing world has been buzzing loudly with speculation that Apple is going to substantially increase its ad sales programs. Most of the buzz is positive, since nothing makes marketers more excited than a new ad channel. But some observers note that Apple’s privacy rules make it hard for other companies to sell ads to Apple customers.
Less than a month after releasing cross-domain first-party cookies, the new product elves at Celebrus are back with a share-nothing approach to loads personalization rules onto a user’s device and applies them to locally-stored behavior data. The data never leaves the device but it’s retained across sessions so the system can get smarter over time.
Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.