CDP Institute

Today’s news is all about easing frustrations.  We’ll start with OpenPath from ad buying platform The Trade Desk, which lets advertisers avoid the usual programmatic bucket brigade and buy direct from premium publishers.  It’s a sign of how frustrated everyone is with the current adtech briar patch.

Validity is helping frustrated sales teams with GridBuddy Connect, a friendly-sounding tool that shows data from multiple sources on a single screen.  It seems the data is presented side-by-side rather than being truly integrated, but that’s better than nothing.  The system “understands” its data sources so users can create their own view without writing any code.

Analytics platform DataSelf has launched a new version of its data loading system, designed to remove the frustrations of constantly changing data sources.  They’re a bit vague on what’s different but say it took four years to build, so let’s assume it’s a major improvement.

Let’s chase some money today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with a $300 Series F funding for Branch, bringing total funding to $667 million.  Branch lets marketers create links that point users on all platforms to specific locations within their app, and measures how different options are working.  Sounds simple but it’s not.

Not far behind, data connection company Starburst announced a $250 million Series D, for a total of $414 million.  Starburst lets companies create write SQL queries that join data from different sources in a data lake, data warehouse, data mesh, or other data mess.  It doesn’t do the complicated data preparation you’d want in a CDP.

Off in the distance, we see a mere $55 million Series C for Radar, which had raised $35 million previously.  Barely seems worth mentioning but they’re a geofencing platform, which you may find interesting.  Capabilities include alerts when people enter a defined area, tracking movement towards a destination, and applying geocodes.  Fun, fun, and more fun.

You might prefer chocolate, but our Valentines gift to you is a matched set of CDP Institute reports on the CDP markets in Europe and Asia Pacific. The APAC report cites the pandemic and privacy regulations as causing explosive industry growth, with a 50% increase in employment in the past twelve months. The European market is more mature, with a still-impressive 22% year-on-year employment increase. Reports were written by AZK Media (APAC) and Adapt Clear Value (Europe) and sponsored by Treasure Data, which had no influence on the contents.

Believe it or not, we have yet another CDP Institute report just out, this one on privacy features in CDP systems.  More than 40 vendors answered our survey on the topic, while found that relatively few call themselves a consent management platform but nearly all can use consent and preference data to govern access to customer profiles.  Privacy features are an important differentiator for at least some of the industry, writes author Marianne Hewitt at Growth Strategy Group.

Finally, Validity reports that a rather shocking 33% of respondents say their staff “often” fabricates CRM data to tell the story they want management to hear and another 42% do it “sometimes”.   Meanwhile, 44% say poor data quality costs their company over 10% of its revenue every year.  But 76% still rate the quality of their CRM data as good or very good.  Go figure.

We all know that CDPs are great, but did you know that they can also fight global warming? So say our friends at SALESmanago, who quote research that finds consumers worry about the environmental impact of ad consumption and cite ways that detailed data collected directly from customers can reduce carbon footprints by eliminating waste and “turn eCommerce into ECOmmerce”. I swear they really wrote that.

You can add BOPA to your buzzword bingo card.  Via.Delivery coined the term Buy Online Pickup Anywhere to describe an ecommerce order delivered to a commercial pickup location instead of the buyer’s home.  Somehow the practice has blossomed even without a snappy acronym: the company says nearly 20% of ecommerce shoppers will choose it when given the option, and it already accounts for 70% of deliveries in parts of Europe and Asia.

Senior Intern Jamie supports both our Department of the Obvious and the Facebook Is Evil team. He couldn’t figure out which one should get this set of Science Magazine editorials concluding that social media makes it tough to communicate sound science. Something about algorithms.