CDP Institute

And for the triopoly trifecta: Amazon’s share of the U.S. digital ad market grew to 10.3% in 2020, up from 7.8% the year before, says eMarketer.  The company took business from Google, whose share dropped to 26.6% from 28.9%.  Facebook’s share also grew, from 23.6% to 25.2%.  Everyone else’s slide of the got a bit smaller, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Facebook cares mostly about selling your data, but they’ll take your money directly too.  They’re testing a new QR code payment feature to make it easier to use their Facebook Pay money transfer service.  Talk about strategic fit: trust is essential for financial services providers and who doesn’t trust Facebook?

Customer identity data company LiveRamp announced an API integration on the Google Cloud Marketplace.  This means Google Cloud users will be able to access LiveRamp’s identity services and data  without custom development.  LiveRamp says the move enhances consumer privacy since companies don’t have to send their data to partners for processing.  Our privacy advocate friends are unconvinced.

Trust plays a role in no-code systems but the reason I’m writing about Upsolver is that it assembles data from multiple sources and makes it available for analysis.  It’s not exactly a CDP but does show how cloud technologies are serving some CDP-like functions.  Upsolver just raised a $25 million Series B and released a free “community” edition so you can try it for yourself.

Digital identity is about trusting that someone is who they say they are – or, rather, finding ways to check their claim. It’s becoming more important to marketers as they rely more on first-party data. So you might care that identity network ID.me, which gives consumers control over their own credentials, recently raised a $100 million Series C. A bit before that, identity verifier Socure had its own $100 million round.

You might be surprised to learn that global trust levels actually increased a bit last year, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.  But there were plenty of dark spots, including sharp declines in trust in the tech industry and media.  You can probably use the report to prove any point you want, although there’s no reason to think anyone would believe you.

Third party data isn’t dead or even dying: in fact, 78% of companies plan to increase their data acquisition budget in 2021, according to this Explorium study.  Demographics, company, financial, and anonymized individual data are the most common purchases, while business intelligence, advanced analytics, and predictive models are almost tied as the most common applications.

Small companies are heavily focused on personalization while bigger ones worry more about identity resolution, according to this Neilsen report.  Fewer than 20% of all sizes are very confident they have the right martech, between a quarter and a half plan to increase martech spend in the next year, and bigger companies are much more interested in second party data.  Good stuff.

Mobile marketing platform Airship has added Live Chat, an option that watches online customers and offers to chat when it spots an opportunity or problem.  Triggers can be based on a combination of behavior, location, lifecycle events, and journey status.  Customers will be grateful or creeped out, or maybe a bit of both.

In other non-avian tracking news, Verizon Media has partnered with Catalina to combine Catalina’s retail purchase data on 236 million individuals with Verizon’s information about the online activities of the 900 million-ish people in its global ID graph.  The company announcement says the combined data will be used to measure campaign performance.  There’s no mention of using it to target ads at individuals.

ID5 also asks consumers for consent to a first-party tracking cookie that is shared by a network of Web sites.  There are probably technical differences vs SWAN but what really matters is no birds are involved.  ID5 was launched in 2017 and says it reaches more than 600 million consumers daily.  They just raised a $6 million Series A.

The horrifying plague of bird-themed advertising ID solutions has expanded with SWAN, a proposal for an open-source network that lets consumers consent to being tracked, drops a first party cookie with a unique ID, and then applies that consent and the cookie across many participating Web sites. The concept has backing from adtech companies including Zeta Global, 51Degrees, Open X, ENGINE Media Exchange (EMX), PubMatic, Rich Audience and Sirdata. I’d like it better if SWAN didn’t also offer SWIFT and OWID.