CDP Institute

Qualtrics just announced “a new era of personalization at scale”, the sort of claim that makes my nose twitch.  They’re talking about Experience ID, “a single, unified view of everything customers and employees have shared with a company”.  That sounds suspiciously like a CDP but Qualtrics swears it’s not because they are analyzing conversational data.  Skeptical eyebrow raised.  The new product draws on Qualtrics’ recent Clarabridge and UserMind acquisitions.

6sense is another CDP that won’t speak its name, preferring the truly obscure “account engagement platform”. They just bought Slintel, which will expand their B2B technolographic and contact data by 250 million profiles and 100 million decision makers.  6sense has also been in a buying mood, purchasing pipeline planning tool Fortella last month after raising $125 million last March.  Essay question: How can there be 100 million B2B decision makers?

If you’re looking for a party game to separate the old folks from the youngsters, see who can explain which of the following: IAC Dotdash just bought Meredith Corporation’s National Media Group for $2.7 billion, and Twitter just sold MoPub to AppLovin for $1 billion. Both deals are big news in certain corners of the media industry. Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you about that time AOL bought TimeWarner.

CDP vendor mParticle has raised a $150 million Series E, more than doubled its total funding to $272 million.  They’ll use the money for R&D and global expansion.  As one does.

ZoomInfo has its own plans for world domination: they’ve just launched Data Passport Europe and Data Passport Global, expanding the reach of their B2B data sets beyond North America.  European privacy rules about business data are a bit looser than rules for consumer data, and the company lists an armful of certifications to prove its data is more compliant than a lion-tamer’s puppy.

BritePool, which does cookie-free ad targeting based on logged-in website visitors, has merged with BIGtoken, which pays consumers to complete surveys, polls, and other interactions on a mobile app. The combined firm will use BigToken’s detailed consumer profiles as the basis for lookalike models that select audiences from the much larger BritePool identity universe. It might not work but sure sounds clever.

Unlike most B2C CDP vendors, Zeta maintains its own consumer database and identity graph.  They just expanded that side of their operation by purchasing Apptness, a digital survey platform that publishes install on their websites to both improve engagement and to capture intent signals.  Zeta doesn’t call this “zero party data”, but others might.

As obsessions go, being fascinated by the rise of retailer-owned media channels is pretty harmless, I guess.  So it’s probably okay for me to share that Brandcrush recently launched a marketplace to make it easier for retailers to sell ad space across in-store, in-package, and digital interactions.  They say clients can set up their ad sales business in as little as 48 hours, which is great news if you think consumers should see more ads as quickly as possible.

Inmar also offers tools for retail media networks, along with a bucket of other tech for retail marketing, logistics, payments, and pharmacy management.  They just expanded their offering by acquiring Aki Technologies, which targets personalized mobile ads at consumers based on time of day, location, content consumption, and other in-the-moment signals.  It’s their fifth acquisition in the past two years, although they don’t seem to own a CDP.

Business marketing has been a growth area for CDPs in the past year or two.  ActionIQ entered that arena last week with a B2B edition of its enterprise-oriented CDP.  Special features include partnerships with B2B data vendors, a B2B-specific data model, and integrations with B2B marketing tools including Account-Based Marketing and product analytics systems.

Google continues to offer features to adjust to the loss of third-party cookies.  Its latest is an enhanced conversion API that enables server-side identity matching:  brands tag their Web sites to capture the identities of people who convert and sends the identifiers to Google, which then reports which of those people Google has a record of serving an ad.  It’s third-party cookie-free but only works when consumers log in or otherwise identify themselves to sites that serve the ads.  CDP vendors Tealium and Twilio Segment have prebuilt connectors to simplify... Read More >

Google isn’t the only company trying to help advertisers identify their customers without cookies.  IPG subsidiary Kinesso has just launched “Kinesso Intelligent Identity” (a.k.a. “Kii” and pronounced “Key” – get it?).  Like other solutions, it relies on consumer-provided identifiers, although Kinesso says it “typically” finds 20% more matches across more channels, apparently because it has more identifiers to match against.  Your mileage may vary.