CDP Institute

Oracle has integrated more data from its Unity Customer Data Platform within its Oracle Service solution.  Service will now be able to route customers to agents based on history data in the CDP, while Service agents will be able to see the CDP data while interacting with customers and to assign customers to marketing campaigns.

Maybe it’s just click-bait and maybe the authors are truly hostile, but this Forrester report for Zeta Global goes out of its way to make CDPs look bad.  Most obviously, it headlines that ‘only 10% of CDP owners feel their CDP meets all needs’ although another 26% say it meets most needs, another 35% say it meets some needs, and only 45% actually say it failed to meet expectations.  The underlying assumption is that CDPs should do everything from data collection through cross-channel campaign execution, although the survey doesn’t actually... Read More >

Speaking of click-bait, Vivun promises to “transform B2B selling as we know it” but is then maddeningly vague on what it actually does.  The answer seems to be sales performance reports and forecasts (Hero) and a collaboration hub (Eval).  They just raised a $75 million Series C, so somebody is paying attention.

We have a full basket of retail news today, Dear Reader.  First up is NielsenIQ, which just launched a solution to help retailers run their own media networks with tools to build targeted audiences, manage ads and offers, and measure results.  The same tools would probably support retailers’ own promotions, but retail media networks are a much hotter topic right now.

Marketing automation vendor GetResponse has enhanced its support for ecommerce merchants.  New features include one-click integrations with ecommerce platforms, a product recommendation engine, improved segmentation, transactional emails, a website popup builder, and automation templates.  Ecommerce systems were once very separate from marketing systems, but that gap is almost gone.

Tidio helps small retailers and other businesses improve customer service through automation.  They do mostly chatbots and live chat but also offer a unified inbox for messages from email, social networks, ecommerce, and other systems.  The company just closed a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding $26.8 million.

Salesforce has agreed to buy Troops.ai, which helps sales teams use CRM data without actually opening their CRM system.  Modules include tools to update CRM records, send Slack notifications of changes in CRM data, and collaborate on deals using a hub within Slack.  Troops.ai will be part of Salesforce’s Slack division when the deal closes some time this summer.

You may recall that Zoom failed last year in its attempt to purchase contact center platform Five9.  They then built their own contact center solution instead.  Now they’re supplementing this by buying Solvvy, a conversational AI platform that can answer visitor questions, set up workflows and customer journeys, and analyze content consumption.

Improvado pulls together advertising, customer, and product data and sends it to a data warehouse, business intelligence system, or anywhere else.  This might qualify it as a CDP, but the focus is on advertising performance measurement and company prefers to call itself a “Revenue Data Platform” instead.  They just raised a $22 million Series A, bringing total funding to $30 million.

Google will give consumers more control over the ads they see, replacing current Ad Settings and About this Ad options with My Ad Center later this year .  The unified offering will let users specify the brands and topics they want to see, change personal information used to target ads, and make it easier to see who paid for an ad they are viewing.  It’s doubtful many consumers will bother with the settings but the features give more control to those who care.

Consumers are split almost evenly in their attitudes towards personalized marketing.  Frontier Communications found that nearly half found targeted advertising annoying (46%) and invasive (36%) while a similar sized group find it useful (42%) and enjoyable (39%).  Along the same lines, 28% said they’d pay $50 per month or more for ad-free social media while 27% wouldn’t pay a penny.

We haven’t written much here about the growth of TikTok as an advertising channel, but it’s a big story.  One subplot has been more TikTok tools for advertisers.  The latest twist is integration with Foursquare Attribution, which will enable marketers to measure the impact of TikTok ads on retail foot traffic.