CDP Institute

Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.

One billion dollars is pocket change at Facebook, which just pledged that amount to content creators in an eye-catching headline.  But the reality is less impressive: the money is spread across two years and among several convoluted Facebook and Instagram programs.  TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube already have similar programs involving hundreds of millions of dollars, so if Facebook hopes to buy its way to dominance, they’ll have to try harder.

Zoom has announced a deal to buy cloud contact center company Five9 for $14.7 billion (with a B) in stock.  The price is an astronomical 34x Five9’s $425 million revenue and nearly 5x Zoom’s own revenue.  Zoom sees the deal as giving it a firmer foothold in the enterprise communications market, although Five9 is far from the market leader.

The build vs buy debate isn’t over.  More than half of companies are either entirely (16%) or partly (38.5%) building their own “customer/marketing data platform”, according to this survey of UK and EU CMOs by Martech Alliance for Treasure Data.  Fewer were stitching together best-of-breed vendor solutions (32.5%) and just 10.5% were relying on a single vendor’s integrated marketing suite.  Perhaps related: just 20% have fully connected customer profiles and 48% say their company fails to meet customer expectations for a unified experience.

Xtremepush started as a messaging system but is now one of the companies hoping to sell you a unified digital engagement platform.  Yes, it includes a CDP.  They just raised $33 million to double their workforce and accelerate their global expansion.

Publicis Groupe has purchased CitrusAd, a platform that places ads on ecommerce websites, in physical stores, and in email.  It will be a standalone business within Publicis’ Epsilon group.  If this sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Dentsu bought ecommerce agency LiveArea for its Merkle unit just two weeks ago.

It’s been a Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory week with more news than I can handle.  We have two items from ZoomInfo alone: a direct integration to make their data available within Microsoft Dynamics 365, and a $575 million purchase of Chorus.ai, an AI-driven conversation analysis and sales coaching tool.

Worried about cookieless ad targeting?   Ad buying vendor Centro  has hooked up with semantic content analysis specialist Peer39 to offer a new contextual category recommendation system.   And Captify, which mines searches on publisher and ecommerce websites to build target audiences, just sold a majority stake to privacy equity firm SFW Capital.

Looking for automated personalization?  LimeStory, whose “micro storytelling workflow” apparently creates personalized content sequences (their website is ironically unclear), is entering the North American market with a focus on higher education institutions.  Jivox has enhanced its ability to create “thousands of personalized video variations” with a simplified user interface, connectors to household and contextual data, and automated conversion of outputs into different formats.  And Intellimize has raised a $30 million Series B  for dynamic web pages that create optimized B2B conversion funnels for each visitor.

I think of Twilio as “the company that sells Segment CDP and some other stuff”, but some people have a different perspective.  Those folks may be excited about the beta release of Twilio Live, an interactive live streaming feature that lets companies create their own versions of TikTok, Clubhouse, and Peleton sessions.

Netcore Cloud is another company that I think of as a CDP, although their primary business has been personalized email, more lately expanded to omnichannel marketing automation.  They’re not well known in the U.S. despite serving 5,000 brands in 22 countries.  They hope to change that, having just announced entry to the U.S. market.

Kitewheel is also a name you might not recognize, but, trust me, they’ve been doing sophisticated customer journey orchestration since forever.  They were just bought by customer engagement vendor CSG, which got to know Kitewheel through several joint deployments.