CDP Institute

Privacy tech is a fast-growing industry, as well as an increasingly important use case for CDPs. So it was a shock yesterday to see OneTrust lay off nearly 1,000 people – one-quarter of its staff – despite $926 million total funding. Let’s balance that with last week’s news that Immuta, which helps companies enforce complex data access policies, raised a $100 million Series E, bringing its total raise to $258 million.

It’s not exactly news when a CDP vendor integrates with an identity resolution platform, since it happens all the time.  But we did report last week when Salesforce announced a dozen or so new integrations for its CDP via AppExchage.  So let’s be fair and note that Tealium announced an integration with Merkle’s Merkury cookieless identity resolution and data enhancement product.

Blockgraph is another cookieless identity resolution vendor.  It has an intriguing backstory as a Comcast spin-off now jointly owned with Charter and Paramount, and enabling privacy-safe data sharing and TV ad targeting.  Blockgraph just partnered with FullThrottle, which collects first-party data for its clients.  FullThrottle clients will map their data to Blockgraph households for ad targeting and measurement.

Mom always said you need standards, right?  Be sure to tell her the Media Ratings Council has just released a draft framework for “outcomes” measures such as funnel metrics, attribution, media mix models, and lift testing. The proposal also covers data quality and privacy. At 53 pages, it’s not light reading but it does illustrate just how hard it is to do measurement right.

Some standards are developed by industry bodies and others are imposed by industry leaders.  Google Open Bidding lets third-party ad exchanges participate in real-time ad bidding.  It’s been criticized for siphoning revenue to Google and creating duplicate ad bids.  The Trade Desk dropped it in February and the Yahoo and Amobee demand side platforms dropped it last week.  Pick your own Star Wars analogy.

IAB Tech Lab will extend its Open Measurement SDK to Connected TV (CTV), starting in Q3.  The extension lets a single piece of code deliver viewability information to any verification service the advertiser chooses.  It also adds CTV-specific measures such as signaling if the TV is off when an ad is delivered, which seems like a useful thing to know.  

Let’s burst some balloons today, Dear Reader.  You know how everybody thinks no code and low code systems are taking over the world?  Software selection service GetApp finds no/low code is the least widely adapted (33%) of a half dozen emerging technologies – far behind voice interfaces (59%), Internet of Things (53%), and chatbots (49%).  Still worse, no/low code early adopters were twice as likely to report negative ROI as total marketers.  True believers may counter that no/low code systems are so common that many people don’t realize they’re using... Read More >

Artificial intelligence is often said to be more widespread than people recognize.  Accenture took a close look and concluded that 63% of companies are still just experimenting with AI, and only 12% are using it well enough to gain competitive advantage.  Lots of good advice and interesting detail here – well worth a look.  Or have a robot read it for you.

Product-led growth methods, such as freemium and free trial systems, are the latest silver bullet.  This OpenView report doesn’t exactly challenge the trend, but it does show it works better in some situations than others.  Did you know that activation rates are twice as high for single-user products than products requiring collaboration?

Salesforce has new AppExchange partners for its CDP, including Annalect, Acxiom, Criteo, LiveRamp, MediaMath, Metarouter, Neustar, Nine Digital, Streamlytics, The Trade Desk, Yahoo and WPP Resolve, along with a Google Ads integration. Other news from the company’s Connections event includes several new product names and new integrations among its marketing, commerce, customer service, and Slack products. If that’s not trendy enough for you, they’ve dipped their toe into Web3.0 with a closed pilot of NFT Cloud , which lets users create and manage non-fungible tokens.

Marketers are getting smarter about buying software, and one increasingly common practice is to test software before buying it.  TestBox promises to make that easier by offering preconfigured test installations of selected systems, complete with synthetic data.  They currently offer test versions of several customer support systems but plan to add new categories over time.  The service is free to users, with revenue coming from vendors who pay TestBox a commission on sales.  They just raised a $10 million seed round.

More on software buying: this CMO Council / KPMG study finds just 26% of marketing leaders actively partner with their company’s procurement departments.  Those who do work closely with procurement end up placing higher weight on price, vendors’ industry standing, security, and privacy practices, and less on ability to scale and to meet compliance rules.  It’s not clear this results in better outcomes.