CDP Institute

Advertisers can hope, but the odds against person-based targeting keep falling.  Firefox just extended its already-strong anti-tracking features by adding “cookie jars” that prevent websites from sharing cookies with each other. And privacy-centric browser firm Brave just bought independent search engine Tailcat, which promises not to track users.

AT&T-owned ad platform Xandr is also clinging to the personal ID lifeboat.  It just announced “agnostic interoperability” across individual-level ad targeting solutions including Unified ID 2.0, which The Trade Desk just handed to the Prebid standards group; LiveRamp’s Authenticated Identity Infrastructure; and Europe’s netID unified log-in project.  But Xandr is also hedging its bets with support for alternatives such as modeled and contextual ad buys.

Yesterday’s announcement that Google wouldn’t support individual-level alternatives to cookie-based identifiers shouldn’t have been a surprise.  But this Lotame survey shows that 60% of U.S. senior decision makers still expect to target ads using multiple, interoperable ID solutions and 22% think just one will be enough.  Only 44% think that publishers’ first-party data is a good replacement for third-party cookies and fewer 35% of marketers think contextual advertising will do the trick.

You know it was a busy day when a $6.5 billion acquisition is our number three item. Identity platform Okta just spent that much for Auth0, which offers similar capabilities but targets application developers. Forbes quoted Okta’s CEO as saying they are competing with Microsoft, Salesforce, and Zoom to be a “primary cloud”. Zoom?

We also had a definitive announcement from Google that once it stops allowing third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, it also won’t accept similar-functioning replacements.  Specifically, Google won’t build individual-level profiles based on browsing behavior.  The move will favor publishers who collect huge stores of first party data, such as, well, Google.

Well, that was a fun day.  It started with news that CDP vendor Boxever is being bought by digital experience platform Sitecore.  It’s the latest CDP acquisition by a company wanting to unify its collection of digital experience systems.  Sitecore announced in January that it planned to spend $1.2 billion to its grow its business.

CDP BlueVenn has been purchased by Upland Software, which owns a cluster of customer engagement products including Adestra, Kapost, PostUp, and Localytics.  The company expects BlueVenn to unify and share data across all its systems.  Price was $52 million, a modest 3.5x BlueVenn’s reported revenue of $15 million.  It’s the latest of several CDP acquisitions by firms planning to connect separate customer engagement products.

In a far different corner of the galaxy, Instacart announced a $265 million financing round for its pandemic-fueled online grocery business.  The raise brings total funding to $2.7 billion and values the company at $39 billion.    This has more to do with martech than you may think: some of the money will grow Instacart marketplace and advertising services that leverage its massive customer base.

Disney is also expanding its data-driven ad business, launching a programmatic exchange for video ads, leveraging its data for cross-channel targeting, and selling combined inventory across Hulu and Disney properties.  They’re even promoting their own Disney Audience Graph as a partial replacement for third-party cookies.  Isn’t everyone?

Tighter privacy regulations were supposed to deter companies from sharing their customer data, right?  But this Winterberry Group paper gives a mixed message: it reports that 64% of U.S. respondents are collaborating directly others to share their data in a second-party relationship.  Yet at least as many are also licensing their data to third parties for targeting and measurement.

Forrester sees a different contradiction: it finds that companies are more worried about complying with privacy rules than cushioning their impact on marketing results.  Responses came from a mix of marketing, analytics, and privacy leaders, so it’s likely that marketers alone would set different priorities.   The study found measurable friction between the groups.

Companies that really care about privacy will also worry about how their partners treat customer data.  Consent management vendor Sourcepoint has launched Privacy Lens, an automated service that scans publisher Web sites to check their privacy practices.  Advertisers can then select only the publishers whose practices they find acceptable.  The system also tells publishers how much revenue they might gain if they improved a particular practice.