CDP Institute

Retail marketing platform (and CDP) Ometria has raised a $40 million Series C, bringing total funding to $72 million.  Ometria assembles customer data and then uses artificial intelligence to suggest customer segments, identify campaign opportunities, and predict results.  Marketers still design their campaigns and messages, which can be delivered across email, mobile, websites, social, direct mail, and “more”.

Email marketing vendor Litmus has purchased Kickdynamic, which automates email content testing.  For now, the two businesses will operate separately.

Here’s a cheerful McKinsey report that finds 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% are frustrated when they don’t happen.  On the other hand, Digital Commerce 360 found that more shopper wanted the ability to opt out of personalization (52%) than wanted personalized product recommendations (32%) or web pages and search results (11%).

The News Gods are playing a form of mad-libs where they mix delivery platform (CTV? Out of home? Mobile app? Text message?) with medium (Video? Voice? Display?) and channel owner (Retailer? Publisher? TV network?). It’s a quick-paced laugh riot, so try to keep up.  We’ll start with the now-familiar concept of a retail media network. Grocery chain Albertsons just joined that party with one limited to its websites.  Now, stick with retail but switch to in-store advertising and audio messages.  That leads you to the audio ad network inside 16,000... Read More >

See how this works?  Let’s keep audio and ad networks but change the venue to in-game ads in mobile apps.  Welcome to AudioMob, which just raised a $14 million Series A.   Keep the ad network but switch back to out–of–home and digital and you arrive at a $3 million raise by OneScreen.ai for its “first of its kind” platform that lets advertisers buy everything from buses to blimps to billboards in the same media marketplace.

Keep the digital format but make it shoppable and change the delivery channel to connected TV, and you have Clinch’s digital ad circulars on CTV screens.  For one more twist, let’s stay shoppable but switch delivery to “shareable stickers” in text messages, which you can now get from  NBC Universal and Holler.  

Data management vendor Informatica just launched a Cloud Data Marketplace, which may seem odd – why would they be selling data?  But it’s just a marketplace for a company’s internal users, making it easier to share data sets and AI models with an “e-commerce-like experience”.  I wonder if that includes retargeting – imagine being chased across the web by those hog belly futures you looked at last week.

Data clean room provider Habu just raised a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding to $42 million.  I don’t need to tell you that data clean rooms make it easier for companies to share data in a privacy-safe way, or that it’s a hot category.  But they’re paying me by the word.

Slow cooking is a thing, right, so how about some slow news?  It only took one month for us to hear that journey orchestration vendor Pointillist had been acquired by contact center provider Genesys, as part of its project to be more than a contact center provider.  Genesys also bought conversational AI platform Exceed.ai for the same reason.

Conventional wisdom has it that the pandemic-driven shift to online channels caused a boom in customer experience tech.  So I don’t know what to make of this Jitterbit report that EMEA companies spent 15% less on customer experience integrations in 2021.  Jitterbit believes companies shifted resources to meet urgent needs for ecommerce (up 99%) and employee tech (72%).  Okay, but did CX spend really drop?

Crowdsourced business data has a mixed reputation, but apparently Lusha is making it work: the company just raised a $205 million Series B, following a $40 million Series A in February.  The system recommends relevant contacts from its base of 100 million business contacts and has direct integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, and other common tools.

Lily AI calls itself the “industry’s first customer intent platform for ecommerce”, which is the sort of claim that raises the question of what – if anything – is really new.  The answer seems to be it analyzes product images to extract ten times more attributes than other systems get from text descriptions, correlates those attributes with customer behavior to infer intent, and uses the product to deliver highly targeted search results and recommendations.  The company just officially launched but already has testimonials from major retailers.