CDP Institute

Tech bashing isn’t exactly a market, but it’s definitely a growth industry. WPP’s GroupM media agency is adding heat with a report that the top 25 media suppliers earn 67% of ad global revenue, up from 42% four years ago for the same companies. The better comparison would be the top 25 suppliers four years ago vs the top 25 today, but there’s no doubt that concentration is up.  Plenty more here on other aspects of the industry.

We’ll say it again: personalization does work.  ROI was over 4x for 71% of retailers who invested in personalized customer experience, according to this Netcore report.  Data gathering is a challenge, with barely half using cross-device and offline data (51%) or real-time behavioral data (49%).  Lots more here of interest.

Much as consumers like personalization, they’re still highly suspicious about data collection. Tinuiti found that 79% think their phone listens to their conversations and makes product recommendations based on what it hears. While 46% say apps track their activity to make their experience better, even more say they do it sell their data to other companies (51%), and a substantial minority say the real purpose is cyberstalking (24%), finding their political views (22%), telling “Big Brother” (18%) and reading their minds (18%). (Speaking of trust, I never received the promised... Read More >

Also speaking of trust, our friends at Facebook have announced plans to inject advertisements into virtual reality experiences on their Oculus mobile app.  What’s entertaining, and a bit pitiful, is that most of the announcement is devoted to explanations of how Facebook will absolutely, sincerely, and completely respect users’ privacy.  Raise your hand if you’re convinced.  (I saw that.)

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.