CDP Institute

When MacDonald’s bought personalization platform Dynamic Yield, everyone expected its menus would soon be tailored to individuals. But Burger King has apparently beaten them to it. Digital menu boards will show drive-through customers offers based on the individual’s purchase history and loyalty status well as local conditions and time of day. The tech was developed in-house by Burger King parent corporation Restaurant Brands International, which will also deploy it at its Tim Hortons and Popeyes subsidiaries.

Ushur offers an AI-based, no-code platform to build self-service customer experience workflows. Lots of buzzwords there, although they did miss blockchain and privacy-safe. They still tick enough boxes to have raised a $25 million Series B, bringing their total to $36 million.

Intent data is also on the menu at ZoomInfo, which has acquired B2B data and solutions vendor EverString. They gain 100 million company records and 70 million professional profiles, including intent signals.

The News Gods are back at work and have delivered a sparkling new CDP from Zeta Global. In fact, it’s not a mere CDP but a CDP+. Plus factors include persistent ID management, proprietary intent data and behaviors, and AI-generated insights.

Meanwhile, Gartner has analyzed the tech stacks of 500+ brands and found the most successful marketers prefer best-of-breed product collections over suites and pay careful attention to analytics. They report the average martech stack has 55 products and that leaders are likely to combine CDP with mobile marketing and multi-channel marketing platforms.

We now put most of our privacy news in our separate privacy newsletter. But that won’t come out again until next week and I thought it worth reporting sooner that California Proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), passed in this week’s election. The law adds gives consumers greater control over personal data use, although some think it goes too far.

We’re light on real news today, so I’ll sneak in an invitation to try the CDP Institute’s new Use Case Generator (beta version). It leads you through a structured set of questions and returns a detailed use case suitable for vendor selection, implementation planning, or framing. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

How many companies have a CDP? The answer depends on who you ask and how they define it. In this survey for BlueVenn, 63% of respondents said they had one, up from 51% at the start of 2019. You can question the number but it does seem likely that penetration is growing. Another tidbit: 21% said they have integrated, omnichannel customer experience spanning all channels and the entire customer lifecycle. Plenty more here of interest.

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.

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.

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.

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.