CDP Institute

Connected TV is one of advertising’s main frontiers, although at this point it’s well past the trailblazer stage.  But it’s still facing some challenges that more mature digital ad channels have largely addressed, such as applying frequency caps to limit how often the same person sees the same ad.  Google just knocked a few more bushes out of the way with a feature to control frequency across multiple CTV apps, rather than separately for each app.

Coincidence or conspiracy?  Samba.TV just reported that duplicated impressions are growing on linear TV, resulting in both wasted ad spend and annoyed consumers.  In fact, 97% of linear impressions reach the same 55% of households.  Samba’s main message is that advertisers should spend more on non-linear TV to reach a broader audience and, presumably, reduce duplication.

Off in another portion of the media forest, the communications platform vendors keep building their own empires.  The latest news is that messaging vendor Gupshup has purchased cloud communications platform Knowlarity.  The deal gives GupShup new capabilities for cloud telephony, contact centers, AI-powered chatbots, and speech analytics.  The combination of cloud communication platforms in marketing and customer experience applications probably deserves more attention than it’s been getting.

Rudderstack is usually careful to call itself a data pipeline tool that will “turn your warehouse into a customer data platform”, although their latest press release says they’re “the warehouse-first, customer data platform built for developers”.   We say they’re definitely a pipeline because CDPs are by definition packaged software, not developer tools, and because they don’t control the cloud data warehouse itself.  Whatever you call them, they a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $82 million.

Some people might confuse Acxiom with a CDP, although they are quite clear their business is selling customer information.  They just announced an integration with CDP Treasure Data, which will use Acxiom’s identity capabilities to help customers build their own identity graphs.  Acxiom has deals with other CDPs, although this integration might be deeper than most.

If there’s a third bit of CDP news today, I missed it.  So I’ll give you this Emplifi survey reminding you the customer experience is really important.  It’s a familiar song but bears repeating: more than half of consumers would pay more than 5% extra for outstanding CX, and poor CX effectively ties with poor product as a reason to leave a brand.  I shouldn’t be surprised that more people want to communicate with brands through social media (22%) than email (19%) or telephone (16%), but I was.

Trackers gonna track: SXM Media, the ad sales arm of SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher, has launched a cooklieless personal identifier to track its listeners.  The system collects “a variety of consented listener signals and inputs” to determine which devices belong to the same individual, and uses the resulting “AudioID” for ad targeting and measurement.  Initial deployments will be limited to SXM Media’s own properties but the company plans to add audiences on other platforms later this year.

MNTN helps direct response advertisers sell on streaming TV networks.  They’re on a roll, having just bought Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency Maximum Effort and video creation platform QuickFrame.   That all costs money, so their latest acquisition is a pile of 119 million U.S. dollars.  The round triples their total funding from a prior total of $64.8 million.

There’s not much novelty left in artificial intelligence or no-code tech, and even the combination is a bit of a yawn. Still CausaLens gets a second look because their $45 million Series A will go to AI using “cause and effect” logic instead of basic correlations and pattern recognition. In case you do want more AI information, here’s a Persado study that finds 54% of companies are already using it to create personalized experiences and all but 7% plan to join them.

Remote access – excuse me, “digital workspace” – tech vendor Citrix was just bought by Vista Equity Partners and friends for $16.5 billion.  That’s only sort of interesting, but Vista announced they plan to combine Citrix with data analytics vendor TIBCO, a bauble they’ve owned since 2014.  And data analytics is something we care about, right?

Did someone mention data analytics?  Oh, it was me.  Now that I mention it, here’s a study from Sisense that reports 96% of digital product managers think their customers want them to embed personalized, AI-driven insights into their products, and most think the customers would pay to get it.  Is that an itch you’ve been eager to scratch, Dear Reader?

This Wpromote report has lots of interesting information about marketing budgets, including the surprising news that retail media is already starting to lose importance.  But I’m only writing about it because they mentioned “brandstanding” (brands taking a stand on public issues), which is a new buzzword to me.  I am easily amused.