CDP Institute

Have you been debating whether marketing operations should be centralized or decentralized?  Neither have we, but it’s still interesting to learn that 59% of Marketo users told Perkuo their marops were centralized, 30% hybrid, and 5% decentralized.  More here on most- and least-used capabilities and most common weaknesses.  Is “marops” a thing?  “Markops” would be cooler, since it sounds like “marketing cops”.

There’s an entire genre of survey reports that compare how businesses and consumers see the same things.  This one from West Monroe finds a typical disconnect, concluding that consumers care more about simplicity and less about personalization, recommendations, and new products than companies think they do.  Privacy and security are the most common new digital investment (41%), edging out customer experience enhancement and customer data, both at 37%.

This Elastic survey takes a more positive view of website personalization, finding 88% of consumers say it makes them more likely to continue shopping.  They also note that 41% would share personal data for a more personalized experience, although a spoil-sport would point out that’s less than half.  Price still rules as the biggest reason people search on a website or switch brands.

I’ll take “Minor stories that illustrate industry trends” for $200, Alex.  The answer is “Neustar offers identity resolution within the Snowflake Marketplace”.  The question is, “Is Snowflake partnering with multiple identity management vendors?”

Let’s go for $400.  “Holman invests in Orbee, a CDP and marketing platform for auto dealers.”  The question: “Are industry-focused CDPs becoming more common?”

What the heck – let’s do minor stories for $1,000.  “73% of consumers have security concerns about opening email from brands they don’t know.”   Hmm, that’s a tough one.  How about “What’s one reason more marketers are using snail mail for customer acquisition?”  Well played.

Are you tired of hearing about retail media networks yet, Dear Reader?  I find a wonky fascination in watching players fill each niche as a new industry evolves.  Latest is a In-Store Marketplace, which offers “a consistent, ubiquitous, single-point of integration for any in-store Retail Media platform.”  Ownership is unclear but it seems to be run by a consortium of retail media agencies aiming to provide unified inventory.

There’s definite overlap between retail media and out-of-home advertising, and ads on hired vehicles are a bit of both.  Right on cue, here’s a birth announcement for Lyft Media, which will offer ads on top of vehicles, inside of vehicles, within the Lyft app, and even on Lyft-owned bikeshare docks.  Ads will be targeted by location, not at individuals, so this leans more towards the out-of-home side.

Outbound marketing platform Iterable has launched a new AI Optimization Suite, whose main features are letting non-technical users create custom predictive models and see which inputs drive those models.  This sort of thing isn’t quite table stakes but it’s becoming more common.  Iterable collects and activates unified customer data in ways that seem CDP-ish, although we haven’t classified them as one…yet.

CDP CleverTap has raised a $105 million Series D, bringing more than doubling total funding to $182 million.  You may recall that CleverTap bought personalization vendor Leanplum in late May of this year.  It’s another sign that martech funding hasn’t totally dried up.

Cordial also bucked the funding trends last month with a $50 million raise.  Today they’re back in the news with integrations with CDPs Amperity, mParticle and Segment.   While Cordial itself qualifies as a CDP, its focus is primarily on cross-channel engagement.  Connections between data-focused CDPs and engagement-focused CDPs are more common than many people realize.

Klaviyo had its own funding event recently, a $100 million investment by Shopify.  Today’s item is less pleasant: a data breach involving an unspecified amount of consumer data.  The breach apparently resulted from a phishing attack, as did the Twilio breach we reported yesterday. It’s possible the same attackers are to blame.