CDP Institute

mParticle today announced purchase of Vidora, an AI-based predictive modeling system.  The tool has already been integrated with mParticle to support personalization with predicted behavior scores and values on customer profiles.   It’s mParticle’s second acquisition this year, following purchase of customer journey analytics platform Indicative in January.

Lytics has added new deployment options on Google Cloud.  Private Instance lets clients have a Lytics-managed CDP implementation on dedicated resources.  Private Cloud lets companies run the Lytics CDP for themselves in their own Google Cloud instance.  Both options are targeted at highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare.

ArcSpan helps web publishers increase ad revenue by adding value to their audiences.  It just launched Contextual APP, which applies industry-standard content taxonomies to web pages, making it easier for advertisers to purchase targeted, consistent audiences across multiple web sites.  The result can be significantly higher revenue per impression.

Well, here’s a sad piece of news: 56% of organizations routinely experience high regret over major tech purchases, Gartner reports.  The good news is that some organizations are better at it than others.  The good ones have clear objectives, disciplined processes, move quickly, and include IT teams in the process.

One sign of a disciplined purchase process is to focus on features, not price.  But guess what Demand Gen Report found is by far the most common variable in evaluating B2B purchases, Dear Reader?  Yep, it’s price (82%), trailed by reviews (56%), features and functionality (54%), vendor knowledge of the buyer’s industry (53%), and deployment time/ease of use (50%).  Oh, and 55% say purchase times are getting longer and 59% of buying teams have four or more people.  I’m so sorry.

I apologize for that headline, Dear Reader, but do have one relevant factoid: Ebiquity reports that nearly 10% of U.S. programmatic ad spend goes to “made for advertising” web sites, which have high viewability but low quality, suitability, and effectiveness. In other words, clickbait. The global average is just under 8%. Also, 32% of third-party marketing cookies fire before users have a chance to consent and 93% of domains first at least one. So plenty of other people should apologize too.

Are you tired of bad news, Dear Reader?  Let’s look today at tech to make your business life better.  We’ll start with Contentware, which has expanded the types of campaign content it can auto-generate, based on nothing more than a brief description of the desired asset.  “What used to take 4-7 hours can now be done in 10 minutes” they tell us.  Whee!

Have you been struggling with Byzantine B2B procurement processes?  Balance Payments has your back, with tools for B2B sellers to collect funds through self-service checkout pages.  Features include multiple payment options, transaction fee support for marketplaces, and an API for further customization.  They just raised a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $86.5 million.

Or perhaps you’ve been placing ads in video games and worry about where, or whether, they’ve been showing up.  The media quality gurus Integral Ad Science have just teamed with in-game adtech vendor Anzu to measure important things like invalid traffic, viewability, and brand safety.   I’ll sleep better tonight just knowing about it.