Dun & Bradstreet Eyeing Programmatic; The President On Data

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Programmatic B2B

In a Q&A with Adweek, Dun & Bradstreet CEO Bob Carrigan reveals the company has programmatic media on the mind. While the company may be known primarily for supply chain management and cleaning up B2B lists and records for clients, “we’ve spent the last few months building a platform in a way that’s useful for agency trading desks and DSPs,” he said. Given its acquisition of B2B marketing data-management firm NetProspex at the outset of the new year and LinkedIn’s similar investment through the Bizo acquisition, B2B marketing data appears in vogue. Read it.

Presidential Data

In a wide-ranging interview with President Barack Obama (scraps of which had been posted last week), Re/code’s Kara Swisher pushes on privacy concerns – specifically, whether consumers own their own data. Generally, the commander-in-chief is pretty vanilla (“I think you own your data”), acknowledging the importance of things most people agree on, like not collecting data on children to sell to them later. He also gives lip service to transparency, saying consumers should understand how exactly their data is being used. Of course, the logistics around how that information is communicated clearly remains a big, unresolved issue. Obama also talks about possible reasons – beyond its history with government authoritarianism – behind Europe’s more stringent privacy rules. “Sometimes their vendors – their service providers who, you know, can’t compete with ours – are essentially trying to set up roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there.” Read it in its entirety.

Medium For Adidas

We often hear about CMOs who need to get more tech-savvy as they work more with technologists. But what about CIOs who need to work more with marketers? CIO.com posted an interview with Adidas Group CIO Jan Brech. Brech discusses the integration of the sports apparel giant’s marketing and IT teams, resulting in a “digital experience team” that combines both disciplines, led by an individual reporting to both the CMO and CIO. He also talks about Adidas’ philosophy partnering with digital marketing companies. In general, he says, he prefers to work with mid-sized companies, like analytics provider SAS, which tend to be more nimble than the IT enterprise tech giants. “The pure startups are usually a little too fragile, let’s say, for a company our size,” he said. “What you want is companies that are strong at being able to correlate your data.” Head on over to CIO.com to read more.

Twitter CTR Withers

Facebook drives a lot of publisher traffic. But Twitter? Not so much, at least according to frequent tweeter and The Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson. Using the new “View Tweet Activity” analytics feature available on the official app, he discovered that a tweet with 155,000 impressions netted just a 1% CTR. “Quantitatively speaking, my viral tweet had the click-through rate of a digital display ad in East Asia,” Thompson writes. “Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.” He concludes that Twitter is pretty much “worthless for the limited purpose of driving traffic to your website, because Twitter is not a portal for outbound links, but rather a homepage for self-contained pictures and observations.” Check it out.

Digital Radio Dollars

London lifestyle magazine Monocle has an ear for native. Rather than monetizing via display, it locks all of its web content safely away behind a paywall and turns to digital radio to bring in the cash. The publisher has been running an Internet radio station since 2011 featuring daily editorial programming. It claims 550,000 listeners tune in each month – as compared with its 70,000 print subs. Now, the mag is getting even more deeply into radio with 24-hour programming driven by custom ads products that enable brands to collaborate with editors on show themes. The lines are blurring. Rolex, UBS, GE, Korean Air and Lexus are among Monocle’s biggest advertisers. Digiday has more.