CDP Institute

It may not rank with to-may-toe vs to-mah-to, but surely someone cares whether it’s spelled “cookieless” or “cookie-less”. The consensus among press release writers seems to be hyphenless, so I’ll report that data quality measurement firm Neutronian has launched a program to certify that suppliers of marketing data have followed a cookieless recipe. The certification covers consent standards, opt-in/out processes, privacy and compliance disclosures, sourcing transparency, dataset characteristics, methodology and processing, and performance.

Adtech vendor Yieldmo has introduced a cookieless ad exchange, which classifies inventory based on a wide range of contextual signals including situation, topic, environment, and customer behavior.  Think of it as contextual targeting on steroids.  The good news according to Yieldmo is their approach lets publishers sell non-addressable inventory that would otherwise be undervalued.

Closing the cookieless loop, you can follow those cookieless ads to cookieless audiences with Contentsquare’s new cookieless analytics solution.  The magic here is Contentsquare’s detailed behavior analysis – down to mouse movements and screen touches – which enables marketers to understand customer intent without knowing their identities.  It’s a cookieless dream come true.

The founders of just-launched CDP Nessie are certainly on-trend: no-code, small business focus, Google Cloud Platform-based, and an integrated AI-based recommendation engine.  Pricing starts around €400 ($480) per month.  I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason the Belgium-based company founders, who have no obvious connection with Scotland, chose to name their company after the mythical Loch Ness beast.

You might think the phrase “CRM automation” is a bit redundant, but apparently it describes CRM systems that automate data entry and analysis. Introhive is one, and just raised a $100 million Series C, bringing total funding to $140 million. The company’s AI can map relationships among contacts at accounts, which coincidentally is a skill that (non-automated?) CRM Salesforce also recently added via Einstein. Can we call it a trend yet?

Location-based marketing is definitely a trend, although not a new one. Uberall, which helps multi-location retailers ensure they are found when people do a local search, just raised $115 million to continue growing. They also bought MomentFeed, which helps similar companies with local social media and customer sentiment analysis.

We have a hefty bucket of vendor news today, Dear Reader. First up: cross-channel marketing platform Iterable has closed a $200 million Series E, bringing total funding to $342 million. They offer email, SMS, app messaging, real-time personalization, and a unified customer data store to tie it all together.

Data management software vendor Precisely, which just Monday announced acquisition of Winshuttle, is back in the news with a new self-service digital engagement platform called EngageOne Communicate.  This moves them out of the IT department to let business users design and deliver real-time customer interactions.  Channels include personalized interactive video, chatbots, email, SMS, and “dynamic PDFs”, which include barcodes and QR codes.

E-commerce platform BigCommerce has added Big Open Data Solutions, which lets users send customer, order, and product catalog data to other systems including Google BigQuery and the Twilio Segment CDP. Additional integrations connect with analytics, business intelligence, and personalization systems. The BigQuery integration might let BigCommerce qualify as a CDP in its own right, but it doesn’t seem to collect data from other systems.

Whatever you may have heard about martech fatigue, tech companies remain enthusiastic buyers.  This Spiceworks Ziff Davis survey of enterprise B2B tech marketing leaders found that 51% are increasing martech spend this year, including 19% planning an increase of at least 50%.  They may be asking more than tech can deliver: the top feature they’re looking is a system that creates alignment across people, data, processes, and systems.

Commerce Signals builds ad audiences based on anonymized credit and debit card data.  But targeting households based on their actual purchases would be a privacy violation, so they use the purchases to find a sample of households in a target group, build a look-alike model of that sample using less sensitive data, and sell the look-alike audience.  They just made the audiences available in the LiveRamp data marketplace.

Data management software vendor Precisely has made its second acquisition in a little over one month, purchasing process automation and master data management vendor Winshuttle for an unknown amount.  The earlier acquisition data governance firm Infogix.  Precisely itself was purchased in April by private investors Clearlake Capital and TA Associates.  Precisely was formerly known as Syncsort, which purchased Pitney Bowes software assets in August 2019.