CDP Institute

Marketing agencies owning their own technology goes in and out of style.  Today it’s on the upswing and digital marketing agency WebFX has joined the party by acquiring Nutshell, a B2B SMB CRM and email platform.  Nutshell will supplement the company’s existing platforms, including a reporting service that it calls a CDP.

AI-generated content vendor Jasper just announced a $125 million Series A, which brings its total funding to, um, $125 million.  They somehow accrued 70,000 paying customers on their own.  They also just launched a browser extension that can make suggestions about pretty much any website text, and text-to-image functionality.

It’s charming that the industry term for Wireless Internet Service Providers is WISPs.   If you already knew that, you probably know that Calix offers systems to support that industry and other types of broadband providers.  They just launched Marketing Cloud Plus, which lets providers enhance real-time customer data with demographic, psychographic, and geographic data.  It’s CDP-ish, so we can call it another example of an industry-specific CDP.

Foundry is the publishing and martech part of IDG, which also owns the IDC research firm and is itself owned by the Blackstone investment group.  They just released a contact-level intent data product based on information gathered from titles like CIO and Infoworld, 800+ annual events, and tech including KickFire and LeadSift.  It’s more evidence that the death of third party data is greatly exaggerated.

I wish I had several Snowflake news items today, so I could call it a blizzard and amuse myself for two seconds.  But all I have it this announcement that Optimove now allows direct access to Optimove data that’s stored in Snowflake.  I can still point out that every Snowflake instance is unique.

We do have a convoy of stories related to transportation ads. Uber has launched an advertising division that will, among other things, target ads at individuals based on data it collects across its mobility and delivery businesses. You remember consenting to that, right? Also “electric vehicle (“EV”) charging and media company” Volta is making its ads available programmatically using Vistar Media technology. And delivery company DoorDash has also expanded its self-service ad platform.

This Merkle report on customer engagement contains a hail of factoids.  Item one: under one-third of companies use customer data throughout their organization; the rest (68%) limit it primarily to marketing.  Item two: ownership of the customer experience tech stack is split almost evenly between IT (54%) and marketing (48%, and yes that totals 102%).  Item three: the biggest hurdles to CDP use are implementation (27%) and bad data (24%); the lowest are strategy (9%), use case delivery (5%), and lack of central ownership (2%).