SAP has announced new suites of customer experience and data management applications. The customer experience suite, C/4HANA, unifies marketing, commerce, service, sales, and customer data products including Gigya and Callidus Cloud acquisitions. The HANA Data Management Suite collects all kinds of data, including customer information.
Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has introduced Cross Domain Analytics, which lets brands track customer activity across their own digital properties by using second party (i.e., shared) cookies. This lets them avoid reliance on third party cookies owned by other companies. Segment notes that second party cookies are less likely to be blocked than third party cookies, providing more complete information. The downside is Cross Domain Analytics won’t track customers across other companies’ properties.
Ad blocking by consumers isn’t a response to fake news, although it does threaten the economics of both legitimate and illegitimate publishers. A study from AdBlock Plus and Global Web Index found that 40% of respondents used an ad blocker in the past month. Ad blocking is likely to increase since it’s more common among younger users, just over half the respondents still don’t know ad blockers are available, of U.S. and mobile ad blocking happens less often in the U.S. (so far) than in Asia.
Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime. In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds. It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.