CDP Institute

You’re not the only one doing some last-minute holiday shopping, Dear Reader. RingCentral just bought conversational AI intelligence startup DeepAffects, which creates voice-prints, recognizes emotion, detects intent, and more. DeepAffects already connects with Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting, and RingCentral itself, so it might be listening to you at this very moment.

Private equity firm Blackstone also did a little self-gifting, spending a reported near-$400 million for a majority share in mobile app marketing platform Liftoff. The product uses AI to identify engaged users, run creative tests, and optimize media buys. Other recent Blackstone investments include Ancestry.com, Bumble, and Vungle.

Looking for your own stocking-stuffer but a bit short of $400 million? Spatial has launched a free mobile app offering a “social AR workspace”. Just the thing for that socially distant holiday get-together.

Consumers are indeed unhappy: 85% think a some or great deal of online content is dangerous, offensive, or inappropriate, according to this survey from the Trustworthy Accountability Group and Brand Safety Institute. Nearly all said they’d reduce spending on a product whose ads regularly appeared near malware (92%), terrorist recruiting videos (90%), Nazi propaganda (86%), or pirated content (83%).

Here’s another CDP penetration statistic to add to your collection: omnichannel campaign engine Tinyclues asked 100 mostly Europe-based marketers about the state of CRM, and threw in a question about technologies used. Twenty-eight percent said they had a CDP compared with 46% having a DMP. CDPs were just slightly more common among best-in-class organizations than others.

Most U.S. consumers (73%) think 2021 will be better than 2020, according to this survey from the Berlin Cameron ad agency. Goals for the new year include more time outdoors (46%), more family time (46%), and making new friends (42%). Above all, 59% never want to hear the phrase “new normal” again.

Media spend will rise by 6% next year, according to this IAB survey. Growth will be entirely concentrated in digital budgets, which will rise 14% to reach 71% of total spend while traditional media falls by 5%. Privacy regulations top the list of buyer concerns, cited by 41%, and are closely followed by the need for more first party data (37%).

As third-party cookies vanish, connected TV (CTV) becomes as a more measurable alternative to Web display ads. App Science has just emerged from stealth to take advantage of this with Insights Report, a dashboard that analyzes campaign performance by correlating data from 300 million mobile devices and 110 million CTV households. It’s a spinoff of Sabio, which offers CTV ad targeting services.

Influencer marketing is another highly-targeted alternative to conventional media, but handling hundreds of influencer relationships is much more work than buying a display ad. GRIN offers an influencer management platform to help ecommerce companies solve that problem. They just raised a $10 million Series A, bringing total funding to $19.3 million.

Microsoft Azure has released a tool to discover and map data residing in all systems, within and outside of Azure itself. Azure Purview scans metadata and adds data sensitivity levels that help enforce limits based on privacy or other considerations. Data discovery is a key challenge for both Customer Data Platform implementations and privacy management.

Ad measurement platform Kenshoo has purchased Signals Analytics, an AI-powered analytical platform that lets companies pull in external data for a more complete picture of product and marketing performance. The “connected knowledge graph across brand, consumer, product, campaign, publisher and market data silos” sounds CDP-like but probably doesn’t extend to individual-level customer data.

PostHog – whose stylized hedgehog logo is so darn cute – has raised a $12 million Series A for its open source product analytics system. The no-code system captures events and behaviors in mobile and Web apps, loads them into a data store, and gives users tools to analyze them. Product and content analytics are trends to watch if you’ve already binged all the good Netflix series.