CDP Institute

We haven’t written much about the tribulations of Nielsen’s core media measurement business, which would make a fine soap opera of its own.  The latest plot twist has an “Empire strikes back” vibe, with Nielsen announcing plans to convert its much-maligned TV audience measurements into something fashionably cross-platform and people based.  Stay tuned.

Ecommerce checkout platform Bolt has purchased Tipser, whose technology converts any “digital surface” into a purchasing opportunity.  You can almost see them drooling as they describe the ability to shop in “an online publication, a mobile marketplace, a price comparison site, a social media platform, or a search engine” using Tipser’s “turn-key publisher marketplaces, touchless merchant integrations, and headless implementation capabilities”.  Pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming.

A majority (58%) of email marketers say better access to data would “greatly” improve their ability to run personalized campaings, according to this Simon Data survey.  More than one-third say their IT team (34%) and data team (40%) is involved in the campaign process.  Perhaps as a result, nearly half (47% say it takes at least four days to get the information they need.

Adverx has just raised $14.5 million for “Customer Relationship Advertising,” which certainly sounds intriguing.  What they do is to generats personalized ads for individuals targeted by business-to-business sales teams, and then maks those ads “passively ‘follow’ each salesperson’s current clients and prospects (pulled from the CRM) as they browse the web and social media”.  Annoying and creepy and it probably works.

If being stalked by ads isn’t creepy enough for you, how about being stalked by interactive ads?  Daily just raised a $40 million Series B to bring that particular vision to life, by providing an API that lets users embed audio and video connections into just about everything.  I guess that includes newsletters like this one.  Click here to discuss.

Were you hoping for something even more intrusive?  Well, if we ever get back to in-person events, you can wear a badge from Klik that tracks your physical movements, enables touchless exchange of contact information, and can send helpful recommendations about sessions to attend or people to meet.  Klik was just bought by event management platform vendor Bizzabo.

If robots wrote the news, would they write about other robots?  I ask because there’s been a suspicious burst of items about AI-powered writing tools, just when live journalists might have set things on autopilot so they could sneak out early for the holiday.  Top of the list: writing-suggestion platform Grammarly just raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation, doubling total funding to $400 million.

Also recently, marketing copy generator Anyword raised $21 million, bringing its total to $30 million. They say their system can be trained to copy your brand voice and/or to tailor copy versions for different customer segments. Just a few days before that, writing assistant Writer reported its own $21 million round. Then we have this (hilarious) piece about – and partly by – writing assistant Sudowrite and its $3 million seed round.

I’d finish with news that Salesforce is buying article writer Narrative Science, but we covered that last week. So I’ll switch to other messaging, where API-friendly communications platform Vonage was just purchased by Ericsson for $6.2 billion. Martech vendors like Twilio are Vonage competitors.

OpenText, which provides a range of content, document, security, and experience management solutions, is buying email security vendor Zix for $860 million.  The company says it will add Zix to SMB data protection platform, which is based on its 2019 acquisition of Carbonite and Webroot.

We don’t write much about SMB (Small and Mid-size Business) products.  But now that I’ve raised the subject, SMB payments and communications platform Podium has raised a $201 million Series D, bringing total funding to $419 million.  Podium started as a review-generation platform, but its ability to accept payments within text messages is what’s unusual.

Yelp reviews are a foundation for many SMB marketing programs, so it’s on-topic today.  But their actual news is a man-bites-dog reversal: Yelp has just launched two ad units that let national brands promote themselves by highlighting local companies that carry their goods.  Sponsored Collections show ads organized around a theme while Seasonal Spotlight ads present a rotating sample of brand holiday campaigns.