CDP Institute

Reports of collusion between Google and Facebook (now Meta) to skew the display advertising market have apparently caught the eye of European regulatory agencies. Both the European Commission and the UK Competition Market Authority have opened investigations into the “Jedi Blue” agreement. The collusion was originally revealed in a lawsuit led by the Texas Attorney General.

We don’t write a story every time that Acxiom adds a new client for its Real Identity matching service.  But we mentioned their deal with Treasure Data two weeks ago, so it’s only fair to report that they’ve now connected with the Sitecore CDP, which was formerly Boxever.  The real-time integration is also a good reminder that many CDPs rely on third parties for identity matching, rather than using their own services.

You may think of Typeform as a no-code form and survey builder, but they describe themselves as a “conversational interaction platform”.  Apparently, their investors find that an appealing position, since they’ve just raised a $135 million Series C, bringing total funding to $187 million.  The company says it has over 125,000 users across paid and free products.

First-party data is the new whatever-commodity-you-think-is-most-precious (personally, I go with Fritos).  So the lust to assemble more of it drives many industry deals.  For example, TV measurement vendor iSpot recently bought Tunity, an app that lets users listen to TV audio  in public places like bars, if you remember what those are.  There’s some advertising revenue to be gained but the real value is tracking out-of-home TV viewing.

Semrush helps companies optimize their online content, so you might wonder why they’d buy Kompyte, a company that gathers B2B competitive intelligence online.  The answer is they’re assembling a cache of data that helps salespeople do a better job.  Information scraped from the web might not exactly qualify as first-party data, but it’s definitely something that Semrush can use as it likes.

Questex runs digital and live events related to hospitality, health, and communications, so there’s no question it owns a trove of first-party data.  They’ve just made that that trove even trovier by launching Q Activate, which assembles all the information in a single platform to make it easier to understand what’s on the mind of B2B decision makers.

I have a bunch of acquisition stories today that I doubt you’ll find very interesting, Dear Reader.  So I’ll start instead with this survey from SugarCRM, which found that 55% of marketers say their current CRM can’t be customized to meet their needs.  Even more (75%) say they need a consolidated view of customer information and 81% think customers leave due to a lack of communication and relevant, personalized messaging.

Digital asset management vendor Bynder has purchased contact collaboration platform GatherContent.  The two products are complementary because GatherContent focuses on text-based content while Bynder works primarily with digital assets such as graphics and video.  Price was not announced.

Social media monitoring vendor Brandwatch is acquiring Paladin, which helps brands manage influencer marketing campaings.  The deal lets Brandwatch expand from reporting on social media to helping brands create it.  (I’m linking to a press release because I couldn’t enter Brandwatch’s site without accepting cookies.)

Which of the following would you say was “all the rage last year”: coronavirus, metadata, or rage?  The folks at Atlan vote for “metadata”, and have just raised a $50 million Series B for their system to create an “active metadata platform” that creates a “unified discovery and collaboration experience”.   It’s all about making a company’s data more accessible and manageable, which should definitely reduce the rage in some departments.

Metadata management is about empowering technical people: if it has an opposite, it may well be integrated tools for business users.  Apollo.io has closed a $110 million Series C for its B2B sales prospecting platform, which combines a 220-million name B2B contact database with sales workflow automation.  The company says it has over 15,000 paying customers and is used by more than one million people over all.

How about a trio of Connected TV stories? App marketing platform AppLovin is spending $430 million to buy streaming TV distribution vendor Wurl, which will expand AppLovin’s footprint beyond apps. The Atedra media buying platform has integrated its inventory with Datonics’ audience data, which includes search, intent, life-stage, behavioral, and other information. And, advertising analytics vendor Kantar has partnered with live TV streaming platform fuboTV to measure the impact of fuboTV campaigns on brand metrics.