CDP Institute

Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and more, is clearly a martech enthusiast. They just bought online ordering and marketing platform Tictuk, following an early March deal for AI-based consumer insights and marketing analytics firm Kvantum. It’s intriguing that Yum! wants to own this technology, especially since McDonald’s may sell part of the Dynamic Yield personalization platform it acquired in 2019.

Marketers may or may not love AI, but vendors keep trying. Anyword, formerly Keywee, recently added a $19/month pricing tier and enhanced its “Language Optimization Platform,” which promises to pick the best word for performance marketing ads. Meanwhile, AI-powered video ad creator Pencil has partnered with ecommerce funding provider Clearbanc to offer Pencil’s services to the 4,000+ Clearbanc-backed companies.

Marketing is less interested than other departments in data and analytics, according to this Alation study.  Operations, compliance, finance, and sales are all more frequent proponents.  Marketing and product share fifth place while customer service and human resources bring up the rear.  Alation also reports that AI adoption is broad but shallow: 76% of firms have deployed some AI but just 8% use it throughout their organization.

B2B martech vendor Integrate has introduced Demand Acceleration Platform, whose snappy acronym of DAP should not be confused with the popular brand of spackle.  Like its namesake drywall adhesive, DAP is a versatile glue that connects “hundreds of technology companies, data partners, service providers and marketing agencies, thousands of events and trade shows, and a marketplace of 150+ publishers” to create orchestrated, personalized, cross-channel, paintable customer journeys.  Maybe not paintable.

CDP Optimove just announced new real time segmentation capabilities, which can assign customers to segments using both real time streaming data and historical information.  The combination lets marketers adjust customer treatments based on current activities and journey stage or loyalty status.

Let’s do product news today.  Acquia has launched a new Experience Platform, which includes a content management system, no-code Web site builder, and Drupal development environment.  It also improved analytics, reporting, and compliance workflows in its Marketing Cloud, which includes Acquia’s CDP.

At least I understand this story, which is that hospitality-specialist CRM, digital marketing and CDP vendor NextGuest has merged with Cendyn, which provides related software and services.  I’m a bit embarrassed to admit the deal was announced last month, but thought you’d still want to know.

Infutor is also repackaging existing capabilities, launching Total Consumer Insights, a “third party dataset that provides privacy-compliant behavioral and household attributes on 266 million US consumers across 120 million households.”  It brings together data and predictive modeling products that were previously separate.

You really seem interested in cookie-free identity solutions, Dear Reader, so I’ll share this announcement about Neustar Unified Identity, an “end-to-end identity management solution that enables resolution of offline to online identifiers by responsibly connecting people, location, and device data.”  If I understand correctly, Unified Identity lets CDPs and other external systems tag their data with identifiers created by Fabrick, Neustar’s “next generation Customer Identity Platform” which is powered by OneID, Neustar’s “identity graph platform”.

Finally, this massive global consumer study from Cheetah Digital offers a ton of interesting data about attitudes towards privacy, social media, loyalty, personalization and more.  One finding to remember: consumers consider location data more sensitive than anything else, something also seen in other recent surveys.

NBCUniversal has announced its own version of a cross-channel customer identifier, the uncreatively named NBCU ID. It will let advertisers target viewers within NBCUniversal’s walled garden of TV, online and theme park properties. Other projects include a data clean room and a slew of online shopping tools including Facebook and Instagram apps.