CDP Institute

Martech mergers & acquisitions, stock prices, and private financing all increased hugely in the second quarter of 2021, both compared with pandemic-depressed year ago levels and the first quarter.  So says this comprehensive LUMA report.  Martech M&A grew 214% year-on-year, average stock prices rose 28% since January, and there were more than 40 major private financings announced during the quarter.  Download for details.

A mere $4.5 million seed round isn’t big enough to interest LUMA, but it’s important to Driven Data, which offers automobile dealers “a hyper-personalized, open integration marketing platform that seamlessly integrates first-party data from multiple sources.”  Have we mentioned recently that industry-specialist CDPs are a trend?

Keeping a close watch on customer behavior is another trend, and Inbox Mailers adds its own wrinkle: it receives alerts when consumers are active in their mailbox and sends emails at once.  Consumers don’t know they’re being watched, so I guess it’s more clever than creepy.  Or is it?

Google may have delayed its arrival, but the cookieless ad train has left the station.   Ad sales platform Magnite is chugging along with its entry in the cookie replacement race, a consortium of publishers, advertisers and middlefolk that will use publishers’ first-party data to assign consumers to standardized segments and target ads accordingly, without tracking individuals.  More than thirty companies have joined and Magnite has donated the program to the industry-run Prebid.org group.

“VIOOH’s OOH supply can now be accessed through the Sonata omnichannel DSP by Taptap” crows this press release.  Depending on who you are, that either needs no explanation or makes no sense.  For the uninitiated, the news here is the growing application of digital ad techniques to billboards, signs, and other outdoor advertising.

Since we’re wallowing deep in adtech geekery today, let’s finish with news that IAB Tech Lab has released an automated service that helps to reduce ad fraud by comparing the ads.txt or app-ads.txt files of authorized ad sellers for a given site with the sellers.json files that let publishers check that they’re accurate.  Esoteric but important.