Another alternative to standard CDPs is industry-specific products with native connectors to operational systems. Vizergy, which offers travel Web sites that integrate with reservation systems, already loads and unifies customer data. It just launched TargetingHub to analyze that data and assign customers to segments. Vizergy also throws in 140 predefined campaign ideas to help marketers use the results.
Adobe has released a connector that lets its Adobe Campaign system read Hadoop data directly. It’s intriguing on more levels than I can discuss here. Let’s just note Adobe’s blog comment that this lets Campaign access raw Hadoop data “without complex data migrations and transformations” as if they weren’t important.
Some have feared that audience data would become unavailable once the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect this May. But panic is now being replaced by accommodation and even some optimism that companies can turn GDPR to their advantage. As part of that process, the OpenX advertising exchange has announced its own GDPR compliance and provided a resource center to help others in the industry make the adjustment. If you’re still confused by GDPR, this is a good place to start.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.