CDP Institute

Some CDP vendors build their own identify management systems and some let clients choose for themselves.  Treasure Data, which falls into the latter group, has just integrated Neustar’s Unified Identity solution for data hygiene, identity resolution, enrichment and audience segmentation.  They already have similar arrangements with Acxiom, Allant and Tapad.

Privately-held analytics software giant SAS, which also has a substantial marketing software business including a CDP, has announced it is getting itself ready to go public by 2024.  We’ll see if it really happens: plenty of companies would like to buy them, although not all could afford a price likely to be over $20 billion.

Customer experience vendor Qualtrics, whose core business is gathering and reacting to customer and employee feedback, has agreed to buy conversation analytics vendor Clarabridge in a stock transaction worth $1.125 billion. The fit is obvious.  The deal comes just days after Qualtrics bought experience orchestration and CDP vendor Usermind.

CDP BlueConic has added a data clean room option to its system, making it easier for companies to share first party data with each other without revealing personal information.  It’s part of BlueConic’s suite of products aimed at helping companies cope with the loss of third party cookies.

I don’t know which is hurts my brain more: thinking of Walmart as a scrappy underdog or thinking of them as a tech leader.  Yet here they are, leading the retail resistance to Amazon’s plans for world domination.  Their latest gambit makes Walmart’s online shopping, in-store pickup, and 2-day delivery services available to thousands of merchants on the Adobe Commerce platform.

My poor brain is also struggling with why “reverse ETL” isn’t spelled as “LTE”.  That’s because “reverse ETL” vendor Hightouch just raised a $12.1 million Series A.  They run continuously-updated SQL queries that pull customer data from lakes and warehouses into CRM, marketing, analysis, and other destination systems.  Hightouch doesn’t store any data itself, so it’s really just a data pipe – or maybe an epip.

The CDP industry grew at a record pace during the first half of 2021, adding 20 new vendors, 1,200 employees and $550 million in funding, according to the CDP Institute’s latest industry update report.  It also saw a record number of acquisitions, as customer engagement vendors bought CDPs to glue together disjointed channel systems.  Download for details.

Google Cloud has released Retail Search, a managed service that provides on-site search functions for retail websites.  Google says it will do a better job than other search functions of understanding customer intent and returning appropriate product suggestions.  It’s part of Google’s Product Discovery Solutions for Retail suite.

Comscore’s cookieless audience solution is adding the ability to use clients’ own customer data as a basis for targeting. Working with Experian, InfoSum, and LiveRamp, Comscore will ingest client’s customer profiles, identify content consumed by those profiles, and then buy ads near similar content. It’s a flavor of look-alike targeting that’s based on content similarity not personal profiles.

OpenText has made at least 44 acquisitions over the years, spreading beyond content management into everything from security to analytics to, digital experience.  You won’t be surprised that they needed a CDP to tie it all together.  Rather than yet another acquisition, they built their own, just launched as Experience CDP.  It’s not clear whether it meets the CDP Institute definition of a CDP, but it might.

Experience tracking and management company Medallia has reached an agreement for software investor Thoma Bravo to take them private in a deal valued at $6.4 billion.  That’s about 12x revenue and 29% premium over the average stock price before rumors pushed it up.  There’s a 40 day waiting period to see if they get a better offer, if you’d like to put in a bid.

Just in case you need reminding: today’s consumers really do care about data privacy.  This global survey by FleishmanHillard found that 68% expect companies to demonstrate data protection practices beyond the regulatory minimum, and 56% are less likely to do business with companies that use personal data for company benefit.  The good-ish news is that 45% are willing to share data in return for greater convenience and personalization.