CDP Institute

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.

We’ve seen so many CDP acquisitions recently that it’s almost shocking when a CDP vendor raises money to grow independently instead.  ActionIQ just reminded us that’s an option with an eye-catching $100 million Series C extension, made just slightly less impressive by news that $60 million is new money and $40 million had been raised previously.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to mention that livestream shopping is now a thing.  It’s part of the larger trend for social ecommerce, which itself belongs to the still larger trend of retailers looking for ways to escape from Amazon’s clutches.  So while you may not really care that Nordstrom is adding a livestream channel, at least you know why I’m telling you about it.

The marketing automation industry went through its own acquisition phase several years ago.  Act-On Software never got bought but they did survive.  The company just raised $20 million in a combination of debt and equity, bringing its total funding to $92 million.  It’s their first substantial round since a $45 million investment in 2014.

Was Zaius on your CDP acquisition bingo card?  If so, you can tick that box, because they were just purchased by digital experience platform Optimizely, which was Episerver until recently.  Like other recent CDP purchases, the deal gives the buyer a way to unify multiple customer-facing systems: Episerver had seven previous acquisitions including three in the past two years.

There are measurements and then there are measurements.  Snapchat parent Snap has purchased Fit Analytics, which helps people find right-sized clothing.  You can file this under “social platforms expanding into e-commerce” if you want to connect it to something significant.

Elsewhere in Measurement Land, the Media Rating Council’s project to standardize advertising outcomes measurement has emerged with unintentionally hilarious conclusions that “there was not consensus by practitioners around a single method by which to measure outcomes” and “most users view current outcomes measurement as a largely opaque process in need of much greater transparency.”  Jamie in our Department of the Obvious is impressed.

You’re not the only one struggling to understand the impact Apple’s new tracking consent rules.  Here’s a helpful piece from our friends at AdExchanger on what will change with Facebook reporting.  Long story short: no more holdout tests or store visit optimization.