CDP Institute

The CDP industry had a good first half, with existing vendors growing a solid 10% and eleven new vendors, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update.  But investment activity was down, with just one big deal ($175 million for Bloomreach) and one acquisition (BlueConic sold a majority stake to Vista Equity Partners).  Lots more here, of course.

This set of Moengage reports has lots of yummy data, but what caught my eye is a table showing CDP adoption rates are higher in Europe and India than North America.  That seems unlikely but the larger story is that CDP use hovers around 20% in all markets, comparable to marketing automation and not much lower than CRM.   There are separate reports for North America, Europe, Germany, India, and the Middle East, with Southeast Asia on the way.

Influencer marketing occupies an untamed corner of the media jungle, although plenty of companies have tried to civilize it.  The Association of National Advertisers is helping with a set of guidelines for measuring influencer marketing results.  The guidelines offer definitions for different awareness, engagement, and conversion metrics plus a handy chart of how different social platforms do their calculations.

Data clean room vendor InfoSum has just launched its next-generation product and isn’t stinting on the hype: “safest, most secure, and most interoperable infrastructure”…“solve the advertising ecosystem’s interoperability challenges”… “eliminating all barriers to entry for enterprise organizations to extract the full value from their first-party data – safely and securely – with no risk and no limits.”  While they’re at it, they’ve launched an open-source project using their core technology, which “will be a crucial piece in the democratization of data security and privacy protection for all.”  Wow.

CDP vendor Celebrus is making a more modest but still interesting promise, offering a new technology to share web session data across sites so long as the domains are owned by the same parent company.  Basically it’s a matter of putting the data something browsers will treat as a first-party cookie, even though those are usually limited to a single domain.  It’s patented and, Celebrus says, unique.

Programmatic tech vendor MiQ is also making cookie-related news.  They just introduced CookielessIQ, which gives clients a score on their progress towards cookie-free programmatic advertising, as well as benchmarks against other clients and recommendations for additional cookie-free approaches to try.  MiQ says more than half of its U.S. campaigns are now cookie-free, using authenticated data, contextual targeting, and clean rooms.

Digital experience analytics vendor Contentsquare has raised a $600 million Series F, including $400 million in equity and $200 million in debt. Like many analytics firms today, Contentsquare goes beyond reporting results to making recommendations for improvements in content decisions.  Unlike many analytics firms, it has now raised $1.4 billion in total financing.

Agency network Stagwell has purchased Apollo Program, a platform that collects customer behavior data.  The acquisition will expand Stagwell’s existing pool of first party data.  Apollo will become part of Stagwell Marketing Cloud, a suite of marketing tools for Stagwell clients.  It’s part of the trend for marketing agencies to offer their own data and technology platforms.

Tech companies buy marketing agencies less often than the other way around.  But performance marketing solution vendor Stirista did just acquire digital branding firm ZDI.  Stirista combines its own identity data pool with email and ad buying systems, specializing in Connected TV.

Social media companies are droolingly eager to become ecommerce platforms.  Meta-owned Instagram just removed one more bit of friction by making it possible to purchase through its chat function.  Payments go through the company’s Meta Pay service, which captures so much delicious data and will eventually let Meta charge a commission.

Reality check: social commerce is more appealing to companies than users.  SimplicityDX reports that 48% of consumers consider social media a great place to learn about products, but 71% prefer to make their purchases directly on a brand site.  One big reason is 53% don’t trust social networks with their personal data.  Buying on social also raises concerns about accurate in-stock information, customer service, and returns.

Flip bills itself as “the next-generation e-commerce platform combining a TikTok-like discovery experience with a premium e-commerce service”.  I’m not sure what that means but its website features a lot of people waving around products while talking to a camera.  It’s pretty intense but enough people like it that the company just raised a $60 million Series B, raising total funding to $92 million.