CDP Institute

Open source integration toolkit Rudderstack calls itself a Customer Data Platform, but they don’t meet the fundamental requirement of maintaining a persistent data store. What they do offer are tools for developers to move data between systems. If you’re looking for that, you can now try a free SaaS implementation for up to 500,000 events per month on Rudderstack servers.

Audio streaming service Spotify has acquired Megaphone, which inserts ads into podcasts. Spotify could do that already but Megaphone offers more precise audience data, enabling more precise targeting. Price was $235 million.

If you have some spare empathy today, consider the plight of IT leaders. This Snow Software survey found their top three priorities – all tied at 38% — are the conflicting goals of adopting new technologies, reducing security risks, and cutting costs. Users also reported they feel more sympathy for IT leaders and 41% said their access to technology has improved in the past year.

Dynamic Yield has released “No Consent, No Cookies”, a solution that blocks user activity tracking without relying on cookies. This avoids the problem of using cookies to track whether consumers have consented to cookies being used. Don’t think about it too hard or your head may explode.

Your head may also explode if you try to understand why consumer photo app Snap would buy Voca.ai, which creates AI-based voice assistants for customer support. And yet, they have. Life is filled with mysteries, eh?

And here’s one more puzzle: a majority of consumers in this Mitel survey reported that customer experience has actually improved during the pandemic. The figure was 60% globally and 71% in the U.S. Don’t tell the folks at Snap that chatbots and virtual agents are consumers’ least favorite support channels.

Account Based Marketing vendor Demandbase has integrated its Engagio acquisition to create Demandbase One. Demandbase worked primarily with second and third party data for advertising and Web site personalization, while Engagio worked with first party data for email and orchestration. Scope expansion is all the rage among ABM vendors: you’ll recall that Terminus bought GrowFlare earlier this week and ZoomInfo bought EverString the week before.

Whether marketers really want broad scope suites is questionable: recent surveys from Merkle and Gartner suggest not. This TrustRadius study shows that marketers often misunderstand what buyers really want, overprioritizing chatbots, digital events, and case studies, and undervaluing reviews and free trials. Of course, what people say and what they do are not always the same, either. Are you confused yet?

Of course, when it comes to misalignment, nothing beats the marketing-IT relationship. This Infosys study finds that marketers see the biggest collaboration challenges as improving customer experience and agility while IT managers focus more on skills, company culture, and budgets. There’s a lot more here but the bottom line is companies with better collaboration get better results.

Cheetah Digital has added real-time personalization, multi-step customer journeys, and intelligent offers to its suite of cross-channel engagement tools. The new tools enable Cheetah clients to orchestrate individually-tailored experiences across time and channels. It all sits on Cheetah’s CDP, which it calls an “engagement data platform”.

Today’s Golden Denture Award for toothless regulation goes to the Federal Trade Commission for not fining Zoom after discovering Zoom didn’t offer end-to-end encryption as promised during the early stages of the current pandemic. The FTC did require that Zoom promise to try harder with steps including an annual risk assessment, vulnerability management program, and blocking use of security credentials it knows have been compromised. My kitten has a sharper bite.

European tech regulators have been more aggressive. Their latest act is a formal accusation by the European Commission that Amazon improperly used third-party merchant data on its platform to benefit Amazon’s own business. The Commission also announced a second probe into preferential treatment for Amazon’s own products and merchants who use Amazon fulfillment services.