CDP Institute

It’s a bit of a potpourri today, Dear Reader.  Here’s a report from 360iResearch that estimates the global CDP market at $1.7 billion in 2021, growing to $5.3 billion by 2026.   They offer breakouts by CDP type, enterprise size, vertical, region, and more, although it’s hard to imagine how they’d find that out.  Price is $4,207.

Amplitude calls itself a “digital optimization system”, which could mean almost anything.  In fact, they collect customer-level behaviors and product data, and use it to identify opportunities, build personalized messages, and  track near- and long-term results.  They just added an A/B testing module that draws on the same data, which lets it do much more than standard A/B tests.

Here’s an effort to save by the planet by discarding old emails, which are wasting resources by taking up storage space.   The idea is to put an expiration date on commercial emails, since few people will ever look at them more than a few days after they’re sent.  I’m pretty sure they’re serious, although it might be a subtle joke.

We have a tasty mix of investment news today, Dear Reader.  First is pricing of marketing tech, data, and services vendor (and CDP) Zeta Global’s previously-announced IPO, which proposes to raise $250 million for a market cap of $2 billion or so.  It’s a fairly modest 5x revenue, which will be around $400 million.

Tech publisher IDG is being sold by investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings to a private equity investor Blackstone for $1.3 billion. IDG owns tech analyst firm IDC plus publications including CIO, Computerworld, and Tech Hive. It’s a fire-sale price: not much more than China Oceanwide reportedly paid for IDG in 2017 and fraction of IDG’s revenues, which are I’d guess are between $3 billion and $5 billion.

The virtual event industry is as hot as the publishing industry is not. Hybrid event platform Bizzabo is building on pandemic-driven growth and a $138 million Series E with the acquisition of AI-powered scheduling engine x.ai. They’ll use x.ai’s skills to enrich the experience of event attendees.

Dentsu Merkle has integrated its Merkury identity resolution with the Salesforce CDP. The connection will enable Salesforce clients to link customer data across channels and to supplement first-party information with Merkle’s third-party data. Merkle announced a similar deal with Adobe Experience Platform in April.

ActionIQ and Neustar have added their own identity resolution partnership.  The deal will include unification, enrichment, and activation based on Neustar’s Unified Identity product.  If you’re wondering why integrations like this are needed, remember that many companies don’t have enough data of their own to build a comprehensive identity graph.

Twilio Segment doesn’t have identity resolution news today, but they did just issue a report that shows why it’s important.  As usual, consumers say they expect personalized experiences but also care about privacy and security.  Business answers are less predictable: 85% are providing personalized experiences but just 24% say their omni-channel personalization investments are a success.  (Another 59% say they’re “somewhat” successful.)

Covid may have changed some things, but consumers worldwide are as cynical about brands as ever, according to the latest Havas Meaningful Brands report.  Fewer than half (47%) see brands as trustworthy and 71% doubt brands will deliver on their promises.  Despite this pessimism, 73% of consumers believe that brands should act for the good of society and 53% say they’d pay more for a brand that takes a stand.

One way that brands show they’re responsible is by not advertising near inappropriate content.  Ad quality platform Pixalate recently launched a Publisher Trust Index that reports on quality metrics including brand safety, fraudulent traffic, viewability, and other factors for top 100 mobile and connected TV apps.  The ratings are based on proprietary algorithms, so they must be right.

If you’re looking for a broader measure of brand perceptions, BlueOcean analyzes data from hundreds of sources including social media, forums, review sites, and financial reports to understand consumer attitudes towards brands.  They’ve just announced they’ll release an API later this year that will let third party applications access this data.