CDP Institute

Is there any topic nearer to your heart than data integration, Dear Reader?  Oh, sorry to hear that.  But let’s talk about it today anyway.  We’ll start with news that purchase data collector IRI has launched a suite of tools that let clients combine their own data with IRI data and analytics for audience identification, pricing, and demand prediction.  They don’t use the term “clean room” but that seems to be what’s involved.

InfoSum is a data clean room provider first and foremost.  They’ve just announced a deal to integrate their technology with Omnicom Group’s Omni marketing orchestration and analytics platform.  This will let Omnicom clients to combine their own first party data with data from Omnicom and other sources, without actually sharing the data itself.

Finally, some funding news. Syncari has raised a $17.3 million Series A for its no-code data automation platform, whose superpower is to transform data from different systems into a common structure, so it can be easily shared. And Merge has raised a $4.5 million seed round for its API that lets B2B companies extract data from human resources, payroll, and accounting platforms. Neither system stores the data outside the original sources, so we’re clearly outside CDP territory.

The final fruit of Apple’s new tracking opt-in rules is unknown, but one immediate result is a bumper crop of articles estimating the opt-in rate. Flurry gained attention with an early report that just 4% of U.S. users were opting in, accompanied by other calculations that now run as high as a 24% global rate. AppsFlyer presented figures ranging from 31% to 40% with useful breakdowns by app type.  Branch tweeted some hard-to-parse stats that seem to show about 12% of apps have been granted tracking permission. The Post-IDFA Alliance... Read More >

One thing that’s perfectly clear is Zoom’s growth during the pandemic. They’re looking to build on their success by adding a virtual events platform, which will offer ticketing, registration, networking, and suchlike. They also published an interesting, if predictable, study that found video communications and hybrid events are here to stay.

In case you actually read this newsletter for CDP-related news, we’ll share Algonomy’s latest update.  They’ve added a bunch of new ecommerce connectors, improved controls over data access, program-level control groups, and enhancements for merchandising and product recommendations.

Low-code and no-code system development are often lumped together but this Creatio study highlights that they’re quite different.  Actually, it just covers low-code, finding that just 6% of low-code development is done by business users without any IT involvement.  It’s a safe bet that many more no-code developers are working outside of IT.

Marketing measurement expert Kochava has purchased identity graph builder DigiCenter.  The deal will expand the Kochava Collective mobile data marketplace with richer data and added email and cross-device identity coverage.  The combined business will have data on more than 1 billion hashed emails and 9 billion devices.

Here are two more bits of identity-related news. Verticast’s Valassis has launched Household Connect, which groups devices into households based on their behaviors and ties them to a physical address. And TVSquared has integrated Foursquare location data to tie TV ads to store visits and foot traffic. Household Connect will enable better ad targeting while the TVSquared enhancement will improve campaign measurement.

Klaviyo rather slyly describes itself as a “customer data and marketing automation platform”, which may or not mean they claim to be a CDP.  They do build unified profiles with data from ecommerce systems and web sites but it’s not clear they support all the inputs required by a CDP or make the resulting profiles easily available.  What is clear is they’ve just raised a $320 million Series D at a $9.15 billion-with-a-b valuation, and have doubled their customer count to over 70,000 in the past year.

Piano is another company that doesn’t call itself a CDP but still builds unified customer profiles.  Their focus is supporting subscription businesses with features ranging from subscription sales to personalized experience creation to recommendations to audience segmentation.  They just raised a $20 million Series C plus $68 million in debt, on top of a previous $28 million.