CDP Institute

Dentsu Group is expanding the commerce capabilities of its Merkle unit by purchasing customer service and commerce agency LiveArea.  LiveArea was the consulting arm of PFSweb, which will continue to offer fulfillment services.  PFSweb reported the price at $250 million, roughly three times LiveArea revenues of $85 million.

Adtech developer The Trade Desk has launched a new trading platform aimed at dealing with the post-cookie ad world. The new platform includes onboarding for advertisers’ first-party data, support for non-cookie IDs such as Unified ID 2.0, support for addressable TV ads, and a measurement marketplace to incorporate data from retailers and other offsite sources. The Trade Desk also announced a new venture capital arm to invest in other adtech firms.

Fast-growing event management platform Hopin is buying Attendify, which provides an “attendee data platform” to support CRM and marketing functions including email campaigns.  It’s (at least) the fifth acquisition Hopin has made this year.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other big tech players are pushing back against Hong Kong’s new data protection law, asking for clarifications in rules that could criminalize publishing personal data.  A June 25 letter from the Asia Internet Coalition said the companies might “refrain from investing and offering their services in Hong Kong” but later discussions made clear this is unlikely.

Speaking of escape from oppressive regimes, e-commerce vendor Shogun has raised $67.5 million to help companies create alternatives to selling their products through Amazon and other marketplaces.   Shogun offers tools to build ecommerce storefronts that connect with platforms including Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce – putting the head in headless, as it were.   Shogun has now raised $114.5 million total.

Connected TVs are another escape path from the walled gardens and (some) privacy constraints.  TV maker VIZIO has just certified several vendors for meeting the Open Addressable Ready (OAR) specifications for TV ad targeting.  VIZIO can serve ads on more than 11 million addressable TVs in the U.S.   OAR members include AMC Networks, Comcast NBCUniversal, Discovery Networks, Disney, EW Scripps, Fox, Hearst Television, Univision, ViacomCBS, VIZIO and WarnerMedia.

LeanData, which offers B2B lead routing and lead-to-account matching services, has added an integration with ZoomInfo.  The new arrangement will make it easier to add ZoomInfo data to records as they’re being processed by LeanData.  It all happens within the Salesforce CRM system.

Complementics, which captures behaviors through SDKs on one billion global devices, is making its information available through the Narrative streaming data marketplace.  Complementics builds profiles of app audiences, location visitors, and demographic segments.  It doesn’t tie its data to personal identifiers but it does collect information such as mobile ad IDs and IP addresses, which will raise some privacy hackles.

As privacy rules make it tougher to track individuals, marketers will be hungrily eyeing contextual advertising alternatives.  The gigantic audience for digital games is especially enticing.  TV ad tech company Simulmedia is serving up playerWON, which will deliver TV-style ads on game consoles and PCs.  To avoid annoying game players, the ads will be served only with permission and in exchange for in-game rewards.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute’s Department of the Obvious. Today is a holiday for the paid employees of the Institute, so the Boss said I could write a newsletter if I wanted to. Boy, howdy! Deloitte Digital reports that work-from-home increased at call centers during the pandemic, from 6% to 77%. More surprising: 80% of companies plan to close their physical call centers permanently. Sadly unsurprising: just 11% of organizations can “seamlessly” transition customers across channels and experiences. Is “seamlessly” is really a word?

This pair of retail studies packs in a month’s worth of obvious.  Retail Touch Points  and Euromonitor agree that ecommerce increased during the pandemic, free shipping became even more important, and supply chain issues were a big headache.  You knew that.  But did you know that Euromonitor found 20% of consumers would implant a microchip in their finger to making buying easier?

Finally, in-person experience vendor AnyRoad reports that live events are back: 75% of brands have relaunched live experiences and the percentage of consumers attending an in-person experience jumped from 4% in May 2020 to 68% in May 2021. It turns out that people got bored with online experiences pretty quickly: online experience attendance peaked in July 2020.