CDP Institute

European anti-trust authorities are increasing their pressure on Big Tech.  Last week, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into Microsoft’s practice of bundling Teams with its Office productivity suite, while the French Competition Authority announced an inquiry into whether Apple is using customer data for ad tracking without following the same rules it imposes on competitors via App Tracking Transparency.

Back in the tech-friendly US, major AI companies have formed the Frontier Model Forum to self-regulate the industry.  Beyond the stated purpose of promoting safe model development, unstated goals include staving off formal government regulation and blocking competition from small firms.  This is different from the voluntary agreement many of the same companies recently announced with the Biden Administration.

Big Tech companies cooperate in some ways but compete in others.  Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Tom Tom have just released a set of data that could be used to build maps without relying on services from Google and Apple.  As location data becomes more precious, other firms have more reason to build their own services.

Amazon Web Services has launched an identity resolution service that will enable AWS customers to match records using a variety of rule- and machine-learning-based matching methods. Partners integrating with the service include ActionIQ and Merkle, and AWS plans to link with LiveRamp, TransUnion, and the Unified ID 2.0 framework in the near future.

Hightouch spent years claiming most companies could use their existing data warehouse and Hightouch’s reverse ETL platform instead of a CDP. They’ve just launched a toolkit for identity resolution, a CDP requirement that Hightouch now acknowledges is missing from most warehouse designs. They also announced $38 million in new funding, which may help them grow again: according to LinkedIn, their headcount shrank by 4% in the past six months.

One of the more legitimate criticisms of CDPs is that many systems can only load data that has a customer ID attached. While this isn’t a problem for the core CDP function of building customer profiles, it can limit other use cases, and some number of CDP vendors have removed the constraint. Zeotap recently joined that group.

Demandbase has launched an ad buying platform that can target B2B audiences on Connected TV (CTV). The trick seems to be that they’ve mapped their B2B account database to CTV households. The solution can also incorporate Demandbase’s intent signals, performance measurement, and other magic.

Innovid is leveraging its CTV household data to enable conversion reporting on CTV, linear, and digital platforms. They match their CTV data with identifiers from other sources, including advertisers’ own first-party information and other industry-standard identifiers. The result will be cross-channel performance measurement without cookies.

Media measurement vendor IAS has its fingers in many channel pies. It has just stuck its thumb a bit deeper into retail media in a deal to measure onsite quality for Criteo’s network of retail media properties. IAS will report on viewability and invalid traffic, helping to avoid some types of ad fraud.

Tealium has expanded its integrations with Conversion APIs for Meta, Google, Snap, TikoTok, and others.  The new capabilities will make it easier to measure advertising results.  This is part of a larger trend to build ad audiences in CDPs as DMPs fade from the scene.

Bloomreach Engagement is now available in the Shopify App Store.  Engagement lets Shopify merchants combine data from Shopify and other sources to create unified profiles, and then develop marketing campaigns based on those profiles.

Messaging platform Customer.io has added a data pipeline that lets it collect data from multiple sources and send it to a data warehouse, and also moves data from a warehouse to other destinations.  While this doesn’t make them a CDP, the company also has product called Journeys that builds proper customer profiles and would tick the CDP boxes.