CDP Institute

Merkle has set up so many partnerships for its Merkury identity resolution platform that it would probably be news if they stopped. But they haven’t: last week, they announced an integration that will let advertisers select audiences in Merkury and execute them through TransUnion’s TruAudience connected TV (CTV) publishing partners. The week before, Merkle announced advertisers will be able to buy Merkury audiences through the OpenX publisher inventory across display, mobile, and CTV.

Here’s a reminder of how many ways advertisers can find you: Xiaomi, which calls itself the world’s second-largest smartphone maker although this report places them sixth, has created a direct integration with The Trade Desk to sell ads on Xiaomi’s proprietary mobile ecosystem. You knew your smartphone maker sold ads, right?

Industry-specific CDPs are a trend and so are CDPs integrated with operational systems like ecommerce.  So here’s a two-fer: restaurant-focused customer engagement and CDP vendor Wisely was just bought by on-demand restaurant commerce platform  Olo.  Price was $77 million in case and about $110 million in Olo stock.

Customer engagement vendor (and CDP) Cheetah Digital is merging with CM Group, which owns marketing messaging brands including Campaign Monitor, Sailthru, Selligent, and emma.  The deal will give CM Group a larger presence among enterprise customers.  The Cheetah Digital brand will continue after the deal is complete.

“The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends” proclaims a snappy tune in the classic musical Oklahoma! This Sitecore/Wunderman Thompson Technology report could use a similar theme song about relations between IT and marketing: more than 80% in each department wish the other group understood their needs better, and they disagree about who is in charge of content and asset management. Other tidbits: lack of data is the top challenge to effective content personalization, and 63% of marketers say they’ve integrated a CDP with their content management system. Come to... Read More >

Everything’s up to date in this Gartner report on CMO Vision, which finds that marketing budgets are at risk as CEOs make digital investments an enterprise-level activity.  Gartner proposes that CMOs respond by redefining themselves as the company’s “chief connecting officer”.  There’s not much data here but we’ve heard this song before and it’s worth a listen.

Twilio has launched a new marketing application, Engage, to complement its existing sales and service tools, Frontline and Flex.  The new product is built on the Twilio Segment CDP using Twilio’s communcations APIs.  I’d ordinarily describe Engage as a marketing automation system, but Twilio swears it’s “the first of its kind: a growth automation platform built on real-time, dynamically changing first-party customer data that allows marketers to quickly build and scale hyper-personalized omnichannel campaigns from start to finish.”

I’d describe Openprise as a data orchestration tool but they prefer “leader in RevOps automation solutions for marketing and sales”.    Whatever the label, they just raised a $16 million Series A, bringing total funding to $33 million.

Nobody does labels like ad agencies, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Publicis Groupe joined with TikTok and the World Advertising Research Center to come up “community commerce”, which this report defines as “a type of social commerce which sits at the intersection of community, shopping and entertainment”.  The general point seems to be that you can sell stuff on TikTok.  Read the report for specifics.

Cloud database Snowflake has launched the Media Data Cloud, a collection of advertising and customer data-related services that include first party identity resolution from Experian, data clean room from Habu, AI-based insights from DataRobot, privacy solutions from LTI, and Unified IS 2.0 and data activation from The Trade Desk.  What’s special is these can all execute within Snowflake.   Previously, users would have needed to export the data from Snowflake, process it, and re-import the results.

API-based communications platform Vonage has expanded its scope by buying conversational commerce tech vendor Jumper.ai.  The acquired firm lets retailers engage with consumers on chat and social channels.  It’s a good illustration of how messaging and ecommerce are increasingly intertwined, if you were looking for one.

Online grocery service Instacart just bought cheerily-named Caper AI, which offers AI-powered in-store shopping cart and checkout technology.  The system uses object recognition to understand what shoppers have placed in their carts, presumably without judging.  It will help both Instacart workers and people buying for themselves – a group that apparently now needs a special label.  I vote for “citizen shoppers”.