In other corporate drama, European adtech vendor Weborama is trying to disrupt Amazon’s deal to buy Sizmek’s ad server and creative optimization tools. Since Sizmek’s bankruptcy overseers have already approved the Amazon deal and Weborama has no hope of outbidding Amazon, this looks like an attempt to boost the purchase price – or maybe just grab some publicity.
Studies including this from Avionos, this from Deloitte, this from Yes Marketing, and this from Signs.com all show that consumers care more about a convenient, low cost shopping experience than personalized recommendations. But, as this Sitecore study reports, marketers persist in believing the opposite. If you’re part of that majority, you’ll be thrilled that you can now use Amazon’s very own personalization algorithms on AWS. Cynics will see an Amazon plot to distract competitors from what’s really important. Optimists will argue that making personalization easy frees resources for other improvements.
Chatbot vendor Aivo has a more positive view of AI’s results, reporting that its clients found chatbots could resolve 65% of e-commerce customer inquiries. It found most questions were requests for information not found on a company’s Web site, which chatbots were good at providing. Download for interesting details on chatbot deployment.
Adverx has just raised $14.5 million for “Customer Relationship Advertising,” which certainly sounds intriguing. What they do is to generats personalized ads for individuals targeted by business-to-business sales teams, and then maks those ads “passively ‘follow’ each salesperson’s current clients and prospects (pulled from the CRM) as they browse the web and social media”. Annoying and creepy and it probably works.