CDP Institute

We have no marketing news worth discussing today, so let’s look at some surveys. We’ll start with this Zeta Global report that found marketing budgets have shifted towards digital channels during the pandemic, and that the loss of third-party cookies makes it harder to target ads. Zeta’s conclusion is that cross-publisher customer IDs based on first-party data are essential, and that CDPs will play a critical role.

Meanwhile, Salesforce reports that most customers (74%) use multiple channels to complete transactions and 76% expect consistent interactions across all channels. But fewer than half say they feel different company departments share information needed to serve them consistently. Obvious but still scary: 61% feel they’ve lost control over their personal information, up from 46% in 2019.

Intouch Insight reports that consumers have shifted to online purchasing during that pandemic but now are starting to return to old patterns. Convenience and price are now their highest priorities, while cleanliness has fallen from first place in May 2020 to third place in October.

It would be fitting to round out this issue with Quad’s announcement of a new direct mail platform, but the core feature – merging mail streams from several companies to reduce postage – is quite modest and I doubt you care, Dear Reader.

Marketing automation platform Selligent has been purchased by CM Group, which owns other email companies including Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Delivra. The deal adds AI capabilities to the CM Group portfolio and will enable Selligent to expand mobile messaging, analytics, and real-time personalization. Selligent was owned by private equity firm HGGC, which bought it in 2015.

Email is apparently a hot investment right now. Email creation platform Stensul just raised a $16 million Series B, bringing total funding to $23 million. It seems odd that there’s a market for a stand-alone email builder, but, apparently, there are enough enterprise marketers wanting a best-of-breed solution to keep Stensul growing.

Two major trends in the CDP industry have been emergence of industry specialists and of CDPs built into operational platforms. Right on cue, ticketing platform TicketIQ has launched FanIQ, which creates unified customer profiles and markets against them. Whether it’s a CDP depends on whether other systems can also access its data. FanIQ also taps into TicketIQ’s 40 million user profiles, matching yet another trend: integration of third party prospect lists.

Speaking of trends, what could be trendier than privacy-safe customer identities? Data collaboration company Karlsgate has introduced Karlsgate Data Exchange, which employs “encrypted, single-use pseudonymized tokens” (okay, those last two are redundant) to match data sets without sending personal identifiers to a trusted third party. The approach is trendily named “Cryptoidentity” but, mercifully, doesn’t seem to involve Bitcoin-style cryptocurrencies.

Here’s what’s trendier than privacy-safe customer data: AI-driven, location-based privacy-safe customer data! simMachines has it covered with personifyAI, which takes a brand’s location-based customer data and uses explainable AI to assign customers to meaningful audience segments. AND they have lower-case company and product names. It’s beyond trendy: it’s trend-tastic!