CDP Institute

Many people think that OpenAI’s ChatGPT answerbot could pose a threat to Google as a search engine.  You.com is trying to make that happen by letting developers build apps on top of its search engine, including generative AI apps like ChatGPT and DALL-E.  Very interesting.

Not so long ago, deep thinkers wondered whether Twitter could be a type of alternative search engine.  Today, they’re more likely to ask whether Twitter will survive at all, given the erratic choices of its new owner.  Here’s a report that Twitter may require users to share location and other data for personalized ads, which is pretty much guaranteed to drive away a substantial number of members and could violate several major privacy rules.

Maybe Twitter’s ad revenue prospects would be limited no matter who was running it.  The analysts at eMarketer’s Insider Intelligence just their reduced their 2022 U.S. social ad spending estimate by $9 billion (12.4%.)  They do expect social ad revenue to grow, but slower than the digital ad industry as a whole.

Qualtrics collects all types of experience data, including transactions as well as feedback, and combines it into unified customer profiles.  That sounds CDP-ish but their focus is on analytics that make sense of the data and workflows that trigger personalized experiences.  They just added three new workflow triggers based on changes in profile data, segment members, or transaction patterns.

TheyDo also collects customer data from all sources, builds profiles, and draws insights from the results.  So far as I can tell, they map journeys and measure results but don’t (yet) execute interactions.  This puts them roughly in the journey orchestration category, which has been almost empty since major independents Thunderhead, Pointillist, Kitewheel, and Usermind were all bought.  TheyDo just raised a €12 million ($12.7 million) Series A.

Recast somewhat grandiosely calls itself an “automated marketing data science platform”, although what they really do is marketing mix modeling and related forecasting, planning, and mix optimization.  Still, marketers can build models for themselves.  That’s kind of fun when the input data is available, which it often is not.  They just announced $3.4 million seed funding on top of a $1.1 million pre-seed raise.

Lots of international canoodling to report today, Dear Reader.  Taiwan-based CDP Appier has integrated Appier’s AI-based predictive capabilities with data analytics and visualization features of US-based Woopra, which Appier bought in September.  The new module, AIRIS, will help marketers get a clear picture of customer behaviors and act on the results.

All-in-one marketing platform GetResponse has become even aller-in-one with the purchase of Recostream, an AI-powered personalized recommendation engine.  The recommendations will now appear in GetResponse emails and web pages.  Both companies are based in Poland.

Nosto, a Finland-based ecommerce personalization vendor, has acquired Findologic, a product discovery vendor based in Austria.   It’s Nosto’s third acquisition, follow purchase of SearchNode (Lithuania) in January 2022 and Stackla (Australia) in June 2021.

Private equity funding has become more common as venture capital becomes harder to find.  So it’s not surprising that customer engagement vendor MessageGears just took $62 million in “growth financing” from Long Ridge Equity Partners and friends.  MessageGears positions itself as an anti-CDP in the sense that it reads data directly from an external warehouse.

Zappi uses a massive database of product and advertising historical data to make AI-based predictions for how proposed programs will perform.  They just took a $170 million a strategic investment led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Their previous funding totaled $22 million.

Private equity won’t matter after the end of civilization as we know it.  That seems one step closer with news that TikTok has experimenting with a horizontal full screen format.  Dogs and cats living together is next.