CDP Institute

I sometimes think I’m writing too much about ad targeting, but then I ask myself: would Dear Reader rather learn that Sailthru has a new SMS?  Probably not.  So here’s news that audience creation company Dstillery can now target programmatic ads using real time signals like URL, location, and time of day. There’s no persistent ID or contextual targeting; there’s also no way to track results outside the ad impression itself.

TV set maker Samsung is also helping to target ads. They’ve just launched Total Media Solution, a managed service that loads an advertiser’s media purchases into Samsung’s own Demand Side Platform, watches the ads received by each viewer, and makes incremental ad buys to reach to viewers who were not exposed. It’s a clever, if creepy, use of Samsung’s ability to monitor content consumption on its TVs.

We’re neck deep in ad news now, so let’s push on.  iSpot.tv has raised a $325 million private equity investment for its TV audience measurement service.  Previous funding totaled $58 million.  iSpot offers an alternative to Nielsen’s ratings, which is a good thing to do right now.

I have so many pet peeves I may open a zoo.  The first exhibit will be filled with people who assume that every CDP includes identity resolution features, even though we’ve been saying for years that many do not, and that’s okay because good third-party alternatives are available.  But for buyers who do want integrated ID resolution, Simon Data just launched Identity+, which uses third-party data and identity graphs to improve resolution rates and attach more addressable identifiers to customers.

The next pavilion will feature marketers who expect automation to save them the trouble of designing good campaigns.  We’ll treat them nicely, because systems like Google’s one-click Performance Max are in fact taking over more of the job – and probably doing it better than the people they replace.  Performance Max, which finds the optimal mix of channels and ad formats, just added more campaign types and acquisition targets.

You’ll exit through a gift shop selling snake oil harvested from vendors over-promising what can be done with a self-service, no-code interface.  I’ll have to be selective, though since I do like the promise made by Coherent to transform business logic within a spreadsheet into an API accessible by other applications.  They just raised a $75 million Series B, bringing total funding to $89 million.

CDPs adoption is significantly above average among high-performing B2C marketing organizations, according to this Loyalty Research Center survey of Fortune 500 marketing leaders.  That’s due to a greater focus on first-party data as companies adapt to a cookieless future.  Other tidbits: the average company uses seven martech systems, 75% are adding AI use cases, and 66% are sunsetting their DMP.

Why should Fortune 500 marketers get all the attention?  Email tech vendor Validity just launched a platform that helps small businesses run better email programs at a lower price.  Bundled features include sender reputation monitoring, list validation, and inbox placement reports.

Smart TV makers are mining their customer data for all it’s worth.  Vizio just struck an exclusive deal to share data from 20 million homes with Nielsen, which will use it to validate several of its research panels.  As you surely know, Nielsen has been under fire recently for the quality of its TV audience data.

Marketing measurement is the topic du jour, Cher Lecteur.  We’ll start with marketing analytics giant Kantar, which just bought Copenhagen-based Blackwood Seven.  Blackwood provides technology for cookieless ROI measurement and media plan optimization.  It’s Kantar’s sixth acquisition since Bain Capital took control in December 2019.

tvScientific also measures and optimizes ad results, specializing in Connected TV performance marketing.  Their tech automatically optimizes CTV campaigns by matching ad exposure to website visits.  They just raised a $20 million Series A.

Readers who are deeply engaged with TV measurement may be excited that Xandr used multiple TV currencies in its upfront ad sales.  The rest of us will be more interested in this eMarketer study, which offers a good overview of ad measurement in general.  It turns out that just 50% of marketers are satisfied with measurement in the best of channels, and video is the least measurable of all.