CDP Institute

Highlighting what’s at stake with third-party cookies, this Advertiser Perceptions survey found that 69% of respondents expect ad performance to drop when cookies are blocked and 40% to rely more heavily on walled gardens like Google as a result.  Two-thirds (65%) have not implemented new audience targeting solutions to replace cookies although 77% expect brands’ own first-party data will eventually become more important.  The survey just had 52 responses but the answers are probably typical.

Mobile messaging vendor MessageMedia has been purchased by cloud communications provider Sinch AB in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. Sinch has been bulking up its communications business with deals including a $1.1 billion acquisition of phone connection provider Inteliquent in February, followed by a $1.1 billion funding round in May. The deals highlight Sinch’s competition with Twilio, which itself bought mobile messaging provider Zipwhip in May for $850 million.

Privacy-safe data sharing vendor InfoSum has launched InfoSum Bridge, which lets users apply deterministic, probabilistic, and cohort-level identity resolution methods.    It’s a collection of matching tools that users and business partners can use on their own data as they see fit.  While InfoSum doesn’t construct its own identity graph, it does offer connections with third-party data augmentation partners.

Lotame does build its own identity graph, which it packages as the Panorama ID and offers as a way for advertisers to track individual customers without relying on cookies.  Unlike email-based IDs, Panorama includes probabilistic as well as deterministic matches, enabling more connections but raising some privacy eyebrows.  They’ve just signed up PubMatic and MediaMath as program partners, enabling advertisers to apply Panorama IDs to their audiences.

Looking at B2B data: ZoomInfo has just released a global database that generously shares opt-out requests it receives with any other company that wants to remove the names from its own lists.  It’s not clear whether ZoomInfo will also reduce its lists using names submitted by competitors.

Twilio Segment has launched a customer journey builder, named, well, Journeys, that draws on Segment CDP data and connections to 300+ applications across email, advertising, app, and SMS channels.  The company describes it as a “critical step towards Twilio’s long-term vision of building the leading Customer Engagement Platform” just in case you were unclear about their goal.

CDP Amperity is working to help companies cope with the “cookie-less future”.  They’ve added integrations with the Unified ID 2.0 identity standard and the Throtle identity and data onboarding service.  Unified ID 2.0 converts customer email addresses into a hashed email (or HEM, as the cool kids call it).  This enables individual-level ad targeting and tracking with partners who have captured the same email address.

You weren’t too interested in yesterday’s acquisition stories, Dear Reader, so you probably don’t care that email provider Pathwire, which owns Mailgun and Mailjet, just bought email preview and testing company Email on Acid.  But any company that is cool enough to name itself Email on Acid deserves a mention.

Cloud database Snowflake gets a lot of attention as a CDP platform. They just announced planned features to make it easier to sell data in their Data Marketplace,  to detect and tag personally identifiable information, and to create anonymized analytical data views. All helpful for CDP users. Release dates are not set.

B2B data and solutions vendor ZoomInfo is buying Insent, a chat system that also identifies visitors, routes them in real time to the right account owner, and can schedule future conversations.  It’s the company’s fourth acquisition since DiscoverOrg bought ZoomInfo in February 2019 and adopted the ZoomInfo name the following September.

Email services company iContact is expanding into search engine marketing with the purchase of Moz.  iContact is owned by J2 Global, which owns dozens of companies including email providers Campaigner, Communicator, SMTP, and Kickbox.