CDP Institute

Salesforce, which owns Mulesoft, took its own survey of 25,000 consumers, business leaders and IT managers worldwide.  They also found that business workers want direct access to data and IT capabilities (82%), in good part because just 37% are fully confident that their IT team has the skills and technology to keep up with demands.  There’s certainly a perception gap: 95% of IT leaders say they’re prioritizing workflow automation, while 58% of business users say IT is preoccupied with “keeping the lights on”.

This Kantar survey of 672 global ad executives confirms that they’re eager to use data more widely in their organizations (80%), to strengthen their data platforms (78%) and to improve data quality (64%).   More than half (56%) expect they’ll use first-party data to guide real time targeting in the future.

Mulesoft surveyed 1,700 business users to find that 68% are “citizen integrators” if that means they somehow help to deliver internal digital services. Nearly all (82%) agree employees need easy access to IT systems and data, 59% agree that failure to connect systems hinders growth, and 44% said their IT department is a roadblock to innovation. A second Mulesoft survey, covering 2,400 IT and business leaders, found 83% feel their groups have become more aligned in the past year (83%) and 87% feel that security and governance concerns are slowing... Read More >

It’s martech funding all the way down today, Dear Reader.  First we have a $125 million Series E for Bluecore, which gathers ecommerce customer data, predicts the next best offer, and sends it via email, site messages or advertising.  The round more than doubles their total funding to $238 million.

Here’s a $103 million Series D for Fullstory, which captures and analyzes digital experiences to identify opportunities for improvement.  The  company says its recurring revenue is up 70% year on year and it now has more than 3,100 clients.  The round brings their total funding to $172 million.

Retain.ai also has raised funds for experience analytics, although it’s a slightly different flavor: they capture browser data from customer service staff to understand how support teams are spending their time, and use the results to analyze support costs and recommend improvements. The $23 million Series A brings their total funding to $27.6 million.

Social media management platform Hootsuite has purchased Heyday, a system that embeds human and AI-based chat in ecommerce, CRM, and other customer-facing systems.  Price was $48 million.  Heyday launched in July 2020 and had raised $6.7 million Don’t confuse them with Heyday.co the marketplace acceleration platform, which has raised $245 million.

Aurea calls itself a “business software library” because it offers one subscription that covers dozens of business software products.  They just added sales engagement tool XANT, which recently changed its name from Inside Sales and will now change it back.  Other familiar brands on the shelf at Aurea include Jive, Infer, FirstRain, Artemis, Interleaf, and CloudFix.

Contextual ad targeting is an important alternative to the people-based targeting that privacy changes is making more difficult. I have a slew of items, so take a deep breath and read on: this Connatix/DigiDay survey finds 65% of advertisers expect to increase contextual ad spend.  Conviva is providing The Trade Desk with contextual content bidstream signals for connected TV ads.  GumGum is providing contextual content information to help guide digital ad placements in the Logiq Digital Marketing Platform.   DoubleVerify is extending its contextual brand suitability tiers to YouTube and... Read More >