CDP Institute

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.

Explorium clearly isn’t a CDP but it also gathers data in its own way. Specifically, it analyzes predictive models and searches its library for external data sources that could help the models work better. They just raised a $75 million Series C. They also released an interesting survey on external data acquisition: 62% use external demographics data and 51% collect anonymized individual data.

Cloud-based communications platform Twilio is buying toll-free messaging platform Zipwhip to expand its multi-channel message delivery capabilities.  Price is $850 million in cash and stock.  Growth of multi-channel cloud platforms is one of the trends we’ve been watching.  You’ll recall that Twilio bought the Segment CDP last year for $3.2 billion.

AT&T is spinning off its WarnerMedia unit and combining it with Discovery, Inc. to create an even larger media business.  AT&T shareholders will own 71% of the combined business while Discovery shareholders own 29%.  This matters to you, Dear Reader, because the new entity will collect even more customer data than before.

To further clarify how valuable that streaming TV data is, we have this report that TV maker Vizio is making nearly as much money from its advertising and data business as it is from selling hardware: $38.4 million for data and ads vs $48.2 million for hardware in the first quarter of 2021, with the data and ad portion growing much more quickly.  The value comes from the comprehensive customer data Vizio’s smart TVs can collect.

Google has clearly reached the acceptance stage in its mourning for the death of cookies.  They recently summarized plans for post-cookie ad tracking, including: consent mode, which adjusts data capture based on user consents; conversion modeling, which uses predictive analytics to estimate conversions on non-tracked consumers; and conversion measurement, which anonymously tracks individuals’ ad response over time and across devices and reports on aggregated results.

Ad fraud and brand safety will still be issues even when third-party cookies are just a fond memory. The online ad industry Is building support for buyers.json, a proposed standard from IAB Tech Lab that lets ad sellers identify ad buyers and shut down the bad guys. Related: content classification vendor GumGum is enhancing its brand safety ratings to include news site quality scores from NewsGuard.  

Cyberattacks aren’t exactly an ad fraud issue but they’re related.  So let’s finish with the admittedly depressing news that 86% of all organizations were victims of a successful cyberattack last year, according to this CyberEdge report.  And that’s just the ones who discovered the problem.  Yes, things really are getting worse: the attack rates is up from 62% six years ago, and the fraction of respondents who expect their company to suffer a successful attack has grown from 38% eight years ago to 76% today.

Another day, another AI survey.  This one by Morning Consult for IBM offers a good overview of AI adoption and obstacles.  Key findings: adoption stalled during the pandemic but is set to accelerate; 51% of companies have a unified view of their data; and data issues trail only expertise as adoption barriers.  Fun facts: marketers invest less in AI than most other departments and 77% of companies with over 1,000 employees draw on more than 50 systems for AI and analytics inputs.

CDP Zeotap has added prebuilt predictive models to its system, enabling non-technical users to create audiences based on predicted Recency-Frequency-Monetary value or Customer Lifetime Value segments.  The system can also enrich audiences with Zeotap’s age, demographic and interest data.  Zeotap is among the relatively few B2C CDPs providing its own audience data.

Ad measurement system Oracle Moat has added 3D game ads to its repertoire. That might not sound very important but in-game ads are a huge industry – estimated to hit $56 billion by 2024 according to Omdia. Moat’s measurements identify potential fraud, which has grown along with in-game ad revenue.