CDP Institute

We have two big funding announcements today: a $230 million Series D for personalized text messaging platform Attentive and $300 million for marketplace platform Mirakl. But haven’t seemed interested in such things recently, Dear Reader, so let’s instead look at this Merkle survey on customer engagement technology. Lots of fun facts including: 67% prefer best-of-breed vs a single-stack architecture; 79% prefer custom-built to off-the-shelf systems; and 26% have API access to a central customer file. Download for more.

Our friends at Gartner have their own new survey, this time about marketing organizations. Two-third of companies said they have a fully or mostly centralized marketing organization; 49% have shared services groups; and a growing fraction (now 27%) have a functional organization, compared with industry (20%), brand (19%), channel (20%) or geographic (14%) organizations. Oh, and companies use agile project management are more effective at everything.

Forrester analysts have also been hard at work, with a Google-sponsored study finding that better use of data and analytics is a top-5 priority for 63% of marketers and siloes are the top data challenge (57%). Fewer than half (42%) have a cross-platform view of Web and app analytics, which might seem like a little or a lot. But 84% consider cross-platform analytics critical or very important, so let’s call that glass half empty.

Salesforce has announced Digital 360, a combination of components from Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud plus new bits including its long-awaited CDP, named Customer 360 Audiences. General availability for Audiences is set for October.

HubSpot had its own announcements today, most notably an upgrade to its Sales Hub CRM to include custom objects, improved sales reporting, and more advanced permissions management. These are table stakes for enterprise clients as HubSpot raises its sights beyond small business.

MailChimp is sticking with its small business base but adding more features to serve them better. Its latest expansion is Smart Platform, a slew of AI-powered features including product recommendations, predictive models, visual asset design, and email subject line advice.

In less cheery news, the BDEX data exchange found that 25% of device identifiers in U.S. data markets are invalid. They blamed ad fraud as the source of most bad emails and device IDs. On the bright side, BDEX believes data brokers can use analytics to identify and remove many of the bad records.

This Verizon report about data breaches is also inherently negative, but I’m actually including it because the report itself is so well presented. It’s worth a download to check out the exceptionally clear explanations and graphics. Take your wins where you find them, my friend.

There’s too much bad news in the world right now for me to add more, Dear Reader. So I’ll sneak back to last week to report that programmatic advertising platform Stirista is buying Nikaza, a location-based measurement platform. Stirista has an identity graph that lets advertisers target customers across channels. Feel better?

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has released a framework and technical paper detailing its proposed approach to ad measurement without third party cookies. The Federation represents ad industry associations around the world. They propose two complementary approaches, one using anonymized data and sampling across all channels and another tracking individuals when first party data can be had. No silver bullets here.

Last May, Comcast NBCUniversal, Charter Communications, and ViacomCBS became co-owners of Blockgraph, a data platform for digital video ad targeting and measurement. They’ve just partnered with attribution platform TVSquared on a measurement solution that isn’t as comprehensive as the WFAs but is considerably closer to being available.

Data.world, a collaborative open data community, has raised $26 million in venture funding, putting its total at $71.3 million. Data.world offers data owners an enterprise data catalog with features to simplify finding, governing, and querying information. It also offers low-cost access to thousands of open data sets.