CDP Institute

We have something for everyone today, Dear Reader.  For those who still doubt that retail media is a Big Thing, customer data agency dunnhumby announced an “end-to-end retail media platform”.  The new offering will make it easy for retailers to monetize their customer data without having to develop the underlying systems from scratch.   Appearance of packaged products is a normal stage in market development, indicating a concept has been well enough defined for developers to understand common requirements.

If you’re fascinated by martech investment, or money in general, you’ll be interested that sales enablement platform Highspot has raised a $248 million Series F, bringing total funding to $648 million.  Highspot helps salespeople to deliver appropriate content to their prospects.   There’s plenty of AI mixed in, if that piques your interest.

Or maybe you’re just worried about the collapse of civilization in general.  Our friends at Edelman will scratch that itch with news that trust levels in major institutions are lower than ever.  “Government and media feed cycle of division and disinformation for votes and clicks,” says Edelman, leaving “NGOs and business pressured to take on societal problems beyond their abilities.”  Have a great day!

In today’s edition of Big Tech Behaving Badly, new filings in a multi-state anti-trust lawsuit show Google gamed its ad auctions to underpay publishers and overcharge advertisers.  The dispute seems less about what they did than whether it was illegal.

On to cheerier topics.  Mobile ad platform LoopMe sold a majority stake to growth investor Mayfair Equity Partners for $120 million.  LoopMe uses AI to optimize media campaign delivery in real time across mobile, connected TV, digital audio, digital out-of-home, and other fun channels.

Staying cheerful, this Treasure Data survey confirms that social commerce is here to stay: 84% of respondents said they made at least one purchase on social media in the past year.  Bonus puzzle: 83% say they’d share contact data such as email and phone for discounts and other benefits, but 58% also say they never share data due to privacy concerns.

Let’s talk analytics today, Dear Reader.  Location analytics vendor Placer.ai just raised $100  million Series C, giving us something big to discuss.  Placer.ai combines more than fifty sources to present anonymized data about foot traffic and sentiments.  Not sure how they detect happy feet but it sounds like fun.

Closer to home for CDP watchers, ecommerce and analytics platform Daasity has raised a $15 million Series A.  Daasity loads sales, customer, and inventory data into a standard data model that is easily available for personalized messaging as well as merchandising, inventory management, and other non-marketing activities.  It probably qualifies as a CDP.

Zagging back towards pure analytics, landing page optimizer Unbounce has purchased LeadsRX, which does lead attribution based data from digital, radio, TV, podcasts, and streaming services.  I guess we can call it a footprint expansion for Unbounce, so one more vote in favor of consolidated products over assemble-your-own components.

It was just a matter of time before the cloud database vendors positioned themselves as CDPs, and it seems that time is now. Databricks just launched a “data lakehouse” for retail and consumer goods customers that promises to unify customer data and do analytics such as personalized product recommendations. That announcement doesn’t mention “CDP” but this recent post by them does. Google Cloud also has a page devoted to its CDP solution, although I never saw it announced.

Data assembly and analytics platform Alteryx doesn’t position itself as a CDP although it might qualify.  They did just upgrade their cloud data chops by just spent $400 million to purchase data management tool vendor Trifacta.  There’s considerable feature overlap but Trifacta is natively cloud-based while Alteryx is not.

Integration platform Jitterbit is also expanding through acquisition, in this case buying low-code development vendor PrimeApps.  More apps means more demand for integration, right?