CDP Institute

CDP vendor Lytics has announced the open beta of a new tool, Cloud Connect, that will let the Lytics personalization engine run SQL queries to extract data from cloud data warehouses such as Google Cloud Platform and Snowflake.  The results will be merged with real-time data streams within the personalization engine, formerly the Lytics CDP but now called Lytics Decision Engine.   Note that there’s still a unified, persistent customer database in the picture.

CDP Blueshift is expanding sales efforts in the European and Asia Pacific regions, announcing plans to open London and Singapore offices and an option to host data in Europe.  The company raised a $30 million Series C in February and is eager to grow its global footprint.

I know you love Gartner reports, Dear Reader, so here’s a fairly modest one about the role of marketing in digital transformation.  The most interesting news is that 80% of CMOs leaders think they’re responsible for leading digital business transformation strategies, a figure that most non-marketing leaders would probably find delusional.   More realistically, 83% say that innovation programs have not met management expectations.

Does the term “no-code” set your heart aflutter?  If so, be sure to sit down before reading that no-code data visualization and dashboarding platform Preset has raised a $35.9 million Series B, bringing total funding to $48.4 million.  Less evolved users can still write SQL queries if they wish.  Preset is a managed service on top of Apache Superset, which some readers will find even more exciting than no-code.

Since we’ve already started down the data geek rabbit hole, here’s news that data quality vendor Monte Carlo has raised a $60 million Series C, bringing their total to $101 million.  Monte Carlo’s super power is making it easier for data engineers and analysts to monitor the quality of data as it moves through company pipelines.  That’s called “data observability” and quite a few companies do it.

I wish I had one more data story but we’ll have to settle for learning that out of home ad marketplace AdQuick has partnered with Catalina to target and measure OOH ads based on Catalina’s individual-level purchase data.  It’s a major step beyond the usual OOH measurements based on broad demographics and foot traffic.  While targeting will be based on historic information, the purchase information will be updated in real time.

B2B has been a growing market for CDP vendors, apparently for longer than we realized: this MeritB2B study finds that almost 40% of respondents have a CDP in place already and another 12% plan to buy one.  In fact, centralized customer data was vastly more common than predictive analytics, lead scoring, programmatic advertising, or intent data.  Who knew?

Satisfaction among CDP users is high: 90% told MessageGears they would definitely (56%) or likely (34%) buy one again. This didn’t stop MessageGears from continuing to argue that CDPs are confusing failure and touting their alternative of reading customer data directly from source systems – an approach that many others have tried and abandoned.  Also interesting: 25% said they bought their CDP, 12% said they built it, and 60% said they did a mix of both.

Advertisers hoping to avoid placements on misinformation news sites can now rely on exclusion lists prepared by the NewsGuard rating service,  The lists will be available through Comscore’s contextual targeting solution, which applies pre-bid inventory filters to programmatic ad purchases.  NewsGuard creates a trust score for news sites based on criteria such as publication of false content, corrections when errors occur, and source of funding.

There’s a geeky sort of comfort in applying the familiar build vs buy debate to CDPs.  But the boring truth is every company will do a mix of both.  Twilio Segment has further blurred, or maybe clarified, the issue with a new Developer Toolkit that helps technical staff tailor their Segment CDP to their own business needs.

CDPs are fun, but they’re just a tiny corner of the martech industry.  Adobe has provided today’s reality check by paying $1.275 billion for Frame.io, whose very narrow function is to provide review and approval functionality for video creators.  That’s not to say Frame is insignificant: they have about 275 employees and claim more than one million users.

InfoSum’s niche is privacy-safe data sharing in a data clean room-ish fashion.  It’s a capability some CDP vendors have (BlueConic just announced one) and others are likely to add through building, buying, or integration.  InfoSum itself just raised a $65 million Series B, bringing total funding to $90 million.