CDP Institute

The Data Agency, a combination of several customer-data-related firms in the Netherlands and Belgium, has integrated its Invicta and LynqID CDP groups. The combined brand will be called Invenna, which was already the name of Invicta’s product. Invenna will be supported by consumer data and data quality solutions from other The Data Agency components.

Does it seem odd that this Treasure Data report found literally 99% of $1 billion-plus retailers have either installed a CDP (40%) or plan to (59%)?  The data makes a bit more sense when you see two-thirds (67%) of those planning add a CDP expected to build, not buy.  That suggests they’re defining a CDP as any type of central customer database.  Download for more on customer data use.

Why buy a CDP when you can buy a CDP company, asked no one ever.  Or maybe it happened at Paris-based business solution vendor Chapsvision, which just bought Bordeaux-based CDP NP6.  It’s Chapsvision’s fourth acquisition since 2019 as they build out their product suite.

Another question people never ask is whether Google and Facebook stifle competition, since the answer is obviously yes.  It’s been less clear that they team up against everyone else, but that’s what The New York Times found in documents collected by the Texas attorney general.  The secret deal gave Facebook an advantage on Google’s Open Bidding Platform.

You may recall that CDP Manthan announced a merger with personalization platform RichRelevance back in November 2019.  They finally completed the deal and have renamed the combined company Algonomy.  The combined firm has more than 400 retailers as clients.

Google Cloud is also offering personalization solutions for retailers, announcing a trio of products that do product recommendations, visual search, and product search within Websites.  The first two are available now and the third is in private preview.

Leaving retail but sticking with AI, Pega has purchased Qurious.io, which offers real-time speech analytics for customer service.  Make that cloud-based, AI-powered real-time speech analytics, which sounds so much cooler.

Let’s talk about cookie-free ad targeting.  Comscore has released its solution, which matches panel demographics with content consumption to predict which online content will attract a marketer’s target audience.   Comscore’s own panel data is enhanced with automation, financial, and location data from TransUnion, PlaceIQ, and Polk via IHS Markit.

eTargetMedia is leveraging its email lists to address a slightly different challenge: display ad retargeting.  They send emails, drop a first-party cookie when the recipient clicks through to the client’s Web site, and then use that cookie to deliver ads on other Web sites.  Remember, first-party cookies are still okay in most situations.

Hearst CDS Global, which mostly handles magazine subscriptions, is attacking the identity side of targeting with Mylo, which lets consumers access multiple Web sites after signing in just once. The idea is to capture more first-party data about each visitor, regaining some of the visibility lost when third-party cookies are unavailable.