CDP Institute

ActionIQ has integrated with Merkle’s Merkury identity platform, making it easier for clients to match, enhance, and activate customer profiles. The relationship isn’t monogamous: ActionIQ has similar deals B2B data vendor Data Axle and B2C data giant Neustar. They also just became available on the AWS Marketplace.

CDP Ascent360 has also been making friends. They just added their system to ecommerce platform BigCommerce App Marketplace. Ascent360 joined the Shopify App Store in July and the Lightspeed app store in June.

Neustar has other news: they just launched Fabrick Impact Assessment, which will predict the impact of cookie- and device ID loss on your company’s media and measurement investments.  There’s a free tool that gives a rough answer based on how much advertising a company does in different channels, and a more elaborate version that (apparently) applies an impact score to specific vendors.   Need we add that Neustar’s offers identity alternatives to cookies and device IDs?

CDP vendors are stepping up to help clients meet expanded privacy requirements. The latest to announce new features is mParticle, which has changed default settings to not collect Apple’s Identity for Advertisers (IDFA) device tag, stores consent decisions under Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) program, prevents unauthorized data sharing, and notifies companies when partners change their APIs. Boring but useful.

Salesforce has wasted little time before integrating its new Slack acquisition with existing products.  It just announced a collection of features under the awkward “Slack-First Customer 360” label, including Slack-powered collaboration features, notifications, and watchlists.  A few are available now or soon but the major sales, service, and marketing features will only start to pilot this fall.

You know I can’t resist a report titled “Making MarTech Pay Off”.  This CMO Council report, in collaboration with KPMG, finds that companies with the most effective CMO-CIO working relationships also do lots of other things right, such as martech planning, measurement, and innovation.   Correlation doesn’t prove causation, of course.  There’s less cooperation at companies where marketing and IT have separate budgets or martech isn’t controlled by either group.

Irony alert: eyeo, which owns the world’s most popular adblocker, Adblock Plus, makes it money by showing ads to users who have consented to see them.  Maximizing that revenue stream is good business, so it makes sense that eyeo has just launched a demand side platform to make it easier for agencies to buy ads that reach its audience.   The company was already selling ads through other DSPs.

Marketing analytics platform Adverity has closed a $120 million Series D financing, bringing total funding to over $165 million.  Adverity collects data from 600+ advertising, retail, web analytics, social, CRM, email, and other sources; cleans and transforms it; sends the results to data stores and analysis tools; and does its own analysis to calculate marketing performance and recommend improvements.   It’s not quite a CDP but the line is blurry.

Sales enablement and content orchestration platform Seismic has raised a $170 million Series G and used some of the proceeds to purchase sales training platform Lessonly for an undisclosed amount.  It’s Seismic’s fifth acquisition in as many years.  Total funding is now $440 million and the company says it just passed a $200 million annual run rate.

Two-thirds of marketers believe that privacy changes will require changes in customer strategy, according to this Tapad poll.  Most are in survival mode, ranking privacy compliance and data quality as more important objectives than personalization, trust, or finding a universal ID.  That doesn’t mean ID resolution is easy: 82% report they’ve had at least one problem with it.

Data professionals polled by Immuta were even more concerned about privacy and security rules: 84% said they expected these would limit access to data in the next 24 months.  This makes a bad situation worse, since 55% say data is often stale today before it reaches end users.   A bit of caution if you expect self-service tools to ease the problem: 71% of data professionals and 78% of business leaders think data consumers are using freemium cloud tools but just 63% of the consumers say they are.

Managers do recognize the problem: 55% of data and analytics pros in this Dremio survey said their company has increased its data investments in the past two years, but just 22% of that group said they had achieved a full return on their investment. Meanwhile, this Harvard Business Review Analytic Service report for Profisee found that 60% of executives believe their company underinvests in data.  They see processes including data governance, master data management, and data auditing, as the most important solutions, not data warehouse or cloud technologies.