CDP Institute

Lots of CDP news today, Dear Reader.  Let’s start with a $100 million Series D announcement from Amperity.  The deal brings their total funding to $187 million and values the company at over $1 billion.

Next up: Treasure Data has completed its previously-announced separation from Softbank-owned Arm, which purchased it in 2018.  Treasure Data will now be in the Softbank Vision Fund 2 portfolio, gaining more independence and easier access to capital.  Treasure Data founding leaders Kazuki Ota, Hironobu Yoshikawa and Dan Weirich are also rejoining the company.

Acquia, whose CDP is based on its 2019 Agilone acquisition, has announced several product enhancements.  These include a unified user interface among its Marketing Cloud components, which include the CDP; streamline campaign management; and a unified machine learning dashboard.  Acquia also announced improvements to its Drupal cloud and expanded managed services within China.

Has the pandemic led companies to prioritize customer experience technology over traditional concerns for security and cost reduction? This Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study for Apptio found that corporate managers ranked customer experience at the top of their list of strategic goals for tech spending. But don’t get too excited: an IDG survey of mostly IT managers found they (still) put cybersecurity, analytics, and business process management ahead of customer experience spending.

Greater focus on customer experience creates greater need for unified customer data, which leads IT managers to consider building their own customer data systems. This attracts data pipeline vendors like Airbyte, which just released an open-source data integration platform including a “connector development kit”. The company raised a $5 million seed round in March and $26 million Series A in May and says it’s on a “mission to commoditize all data integration”.

Few IT departments want to build their own adtech, which leaves the field open for companies like Vistar Media, a specialist in digital out of home programmatic ad buying, selling, and network management. They just raised a $30 million Series B. Funds came from outdoor ad seller Lamar Advertising, which will gain a minority stake in Vistar.

Maybe you’re tired of hearing about Unified ID 2.0 and maybe you’re not.  If you do care, you’re probably interested in this Digiday report that Omnicom Media Group has formally endorsed it as “the post-cookie solution best suited for its clients and publisher partners”.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have made an actual announcement, so we’ll have to hope that Digiday’s story is correct.

The lines between online and in-store shopping are blurring. Retail shopping and payment platform Klarna just bought Hero, which connects online shoppers with retailer staff via text, chat, and video. This Snapchat survey agrees that shoppers want to mix digital and real world experiences: 35% said they’d go out of their way to shop at a store with interactive virtual services such as a smart mirror that lets them try on clothes or makeup.  Over 40% use their phone in-store to compare prices and look for product information.

Want more about retail and social? This BrandTotal survey finds that over 80% of respondents have purchased a product or service as a result of a social ad.  Sprout Social reports that consumers rank “strong customer service” as the most important factor in a best-of-class social experience.  Marketers ranked it sixth in a parallel survey.  Download to see which industries are most responsive to social help requests.

Marketing automation vendor Sailthru has announced an integration with the Twilio Segment CDP.  The integration will unify the email, mobile app, and website data created by Sailthru components, in addition to data from other sources.  What may be most interesting is that Sailthru chose to work with Segment, whose parent Twilio competes with Sailthru, rather than buy a CDP of its own.

Namogoo calls itself a Digital Journey Continuity Platform, a term with more syllables than I have fingers.  In plainer English, it makes personalized website offers based on customer intent.  They just bought Remarkety, which sends emails and text messages also based on intent.  It’s a good fit.

Namogoo’s original business was blocking unauthorized ads on ecommerce Web sites, one small corner of the ad fraud universe.  After years of growth, that universe is finally shrinking, according to this report from DoubleVerify.  Wide adoption of preventative measures has resulted in lower fraud rates, higher viewability, and fewer brand safety violations.  APAC and Latin America have shown particular improvements.  Download for country-by-country detail.