CDP Institute

Customer service system vendor Zendesk has agreed to buy Momentive Global, the owner of SurveyMonkey. The all-stock deal is valued at close to $4 billion, or roughly ten times Momentive revenue. Zendesk describes the merger as creating a “customer intelligence company” because it “connects what customers say and do, with how they think and feel.” Interesting way to look at it.

Data management vendor Informatica returned to the stock market this week, selling about $800 million in stock for a market capitalization around $7.5 billion, or five times 2020 revenue.  Private equity investors paid about $5.3 billion for Informatica in 2015.

We might as well stick with financial shenanigans, so let’s note that conversational AI company LivePerson just made two acquisitions.  VoiceBase provides speech recognition and analytics while Tenfold integrates communications systems with CRM software.  The deals will expand LivePerson’s reach beyond text.

ActionIQ has expanded its real-time capabilities to include data collection via a native tag, plus identity stitching and decisioning with access to the full customer profile.  Real-time comes in more flavors than Ben & Jerry’s, so some parts of this extend beyond the real-time features in other CDPs.  You’ll have to dig into the details for yourself, Dear Reader.  I’m off to find some Cherry Garcia.

SkyPoint Cloud, a chocolate-plus-peanut butter-like combination of CDP and privacy system, has expanded its CDP side with automated predictive insights.  The new feature continuously updates attributes such as churn propensity, product preferences, and predictive lifetime value, mixes them into customer profiles, and serves up tasty-fresh audiences with the results.

Microsoft has cooked up a deal for Clear Software, an integration platform with strong connectors for SAP and Oracle systems.  The deal will make it easier for Power Platform clients to bake information from multiple systems into delicious data casseroles.

The BuzzwordOps team at Acquia has clearly been working overtime to support their latest product enhancements, which include “no-code/low-code solutions that span DevOps, WebOps, ContentOps and ExperienceOps” on the Drupal content management side, as well as “composable machine learning, analytics, privacy and multi-tenant distributed marketing to empower teams across CampaignOps and and MLOps” for their marketing cloud.

Customer engagement vendor CSG also has integration on its mind.  They just launched Xponent, a unified customer engagement hub that supports marketing, sales, and service interactions with preconfigured campaigns, analytical models, and data libraries.  Xponent combines CSG’s historical strength in delivery systems (they started out in telecom billing) with its recent acquisitions of the Kitewheel journey orchestration product and the Quaero CDP.

Data clean rooms let media companies connect their audience data with advertisers’ own information in a privacy-safe way.  The latest clean room operator is Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, which owns ABC, ESPN, Hulu, eight TV stations, and more.  They’re relying on technology from Habu, InfoSum, and Snowflake.

Global martech spending in 2021 is around $344.8 billion, according to this estimate from Martech Alliance.  The figure isn’t a surprise but it’s still impressive.  There’s lots more in the report, including a cameo appearance by CDP as the fourth-most commonly planned martech investment in the next 12 months (28% of respondents).

Before you get too excited about the growth of martech, check out this Ketchum survey finding that consumers have grown less enchanted with technology.  For example, 72% of consumers said in 2019 that tech has had a positive impact on work, compared with 64% in 2021.  Large majorities were in favor of tighter regulation and breaking up the biggest tech companies.  One exception: concern about privacy actually fell from 66% to 55%.

If you don’t like Ketchum’s results, feel free to quote this survey from American Marketing Association-New York, which found the exact opposite: favorable attitudes rose for things like personalized ads (from 35% in 2019 to 54% in 2021) and smart speakers (from 44% to 74%). They did agree that privacy concerns have dropped a bit. One red flag: just 24% of marketers felt they needed consent to share data with other companies, compared with 47% of consumers.