CDP Institute

It’s a quiet news day, Dear Reader. The most excitement I can offer is a $165 million Series H from integration platform SnapLogic, which brings total funding to $371 million and values them at $1 billion. That’s nice but you already knew that integration is a booming industry.

We do have some nice data news left over from last week, when LiveRamp announced it has connected its identity graph with Lotame.  The deal will let Lotame customers access LiveRamp’s person ID, expanding their options for cross-channel audience selection and measurement.

Also from last week, “external data platform” Explorium is making its collection of third-party data sets available in the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Explorium collects “thousands” of data signals from all sorts of places and makes it easy to match them against a company’s own customer, prospect, and other data.

Global warming.  Rampant authoritarianism.  Endless pandemic.  It’s impressive that some people find time to worry about measuring TV audiences.  So thumbs up to OpenAP, which just launched a framework to target and measure all types of TV audiences and signed up a slew of media agencies, media companies, and measurement vendors to cooperate.  Called XPm, the platform lets advertisers work with an audience of 290 million identities, which can be linked with other firms’ first-party data in various privacy-safe ways.

In other obscure but probably important adtech news, Criteo is negotiating a $380 million deal to buy IPONWEB, a major developer of ad exchange, marketplace, and bidding technologies.  The deal will help Criteo replace its third-party-cookie-based retargeting business with something more suited to the future – possibly using retail media networks as an alternative to the Facebook/Google/Amazon walled gardens.

Back on more familiar turf, how about a nice Adobe study that reports marketers are struggling to get value from technology?  Yup, 65% say they feel their productivity is harmed by having too many technology options and 65% also say they can’t keep up with tech changes.  Despite the problems, 79% say they regularly use data to make marketing decisions and 77% use it to demonstrate marketing’s value to the rest of the business.  Download for more.

The Boris Yelstin Presidential Center doesn’t come up very often in this newsletter, so I’m pleased to report that Mindbox, a Moscow-based integrated marketing systemn and CDP vendor that counts the Yelstin Center among its clients, has raised a $13 million investment to fuel its growth and international expansion.  Boris would be proud.

Build vs buy is not the focus of this Antavo report on customer loyalty systems, but what caught my eye was a 49% satisfaction rate for respondents using a home-built loyalty system compared with 63% for those using a purchased system.  No-code fans will also appreciate that 44% say they’re currently very dependent on their IT team, 76% want to reduce that dependence, and 70% want no-code rule set-up.  Plus lots here on loyalty program trends and impact.

If you’re really obsessed with tech debates, enjoy this RapidAPI report that finds use of APIs is on the rise.    Otherwise, you’re probably more interested that Airship found consumers are more open to receiving brand communications if they’re given control over what they’re sent, how often, and over which channels.  You won’t be surprised that the most common reason people opt to receive brand messages is to save money, or that location- and behavior-based offers are the least important.

We have a sudden blizzard of responsible advertising news today, Dear Reader. Must be the holiday spirit. For starters, privacy vendor OneTrust has purchased Planently, which helps companies to calculate, reduce, and report on their carbon impact.  Before you snort “humbug” take a look at surveys from Dentsu and Volta  which both find that consumers really care about the environment impact of companies they do business with.

On the brand safety front, supply side platform Pubmatic is the latest firm to apply website trustworthiness ratings from NewsGuard. Buyers will be able to set a “misinformation floor” on the quality of sites they purchase.  Meanwhile, data quality rating service Neutronian has certified the cookie-free status of DoubleVerify, which itself helps companies monitor ad viewability and brand safety. Neutronian also announced the first release of its NQI Transparency Ratings Report, which rates the transparency and data quality of 150 top marketing data providers.

If you’re struggling to make sense of all this, MMA Global just released a brand safety and suitability guide which is designed to help. You might also check out this DoubleVerify survey that shows publishers see brand safety and contextual targeting as high-priority ad sales tools.