CDP Institute

Salesforce earlier this week announced an agreement to purchase Spiff, a low-code tool to manage sales incentive compensation plans.  Spiff was already available on the Salesforce AppExchange, so this is a reminder that developers like Salesforce still see value in having a tighter integration than the component-based approach permits.

The ad-buying world is an increasingly scary place.  Brand safety concerns now top the list of advertiser worries, according to this Integral Ad Science survey, just beating decreased access to consumer data and results measurement.  Unfortunately, the most important ad channel, social media, is also the one facing the greatest challenge of consumer trust.

Surely the last issue of this newsletter for 2023 has to include an AI survey.  This one, from CBNC and SurveyMonkey, finds 72% of workers who use AI believe it makes them more productive, but 60% are also concerned about its impact on their job.  Only 35% of those who don’t use AI are worried about it.

Snowflake-based CDP Simon Data has launched a service, Anonymous+, that uses an identity graph to link anonymous website visitors with personal identifiers and uses the result for ad targeting and personalization.  Simon also announced an integration with ad buying platform The Trade Desk, which will let users create segments within Simon and send them to The Trade Desk as programmatic ad audiences.

This Coveo report clarifies why identifying anonymous website visitors is so helpful.  They report that more than half of retail website customers identify themselves by logging in during only one-quarter of their visits.  The survey also asks about martech products: CDP ranked last in purchase intent among “winners”, at 36%.  CRM (59%), ecommerce (55%) and order processing (52%) headed the list.  Non-winners were even less likely (29%) to buy a CDP.

Data clean rooms enable ad targeting without revealing consumer identities.  Optable, a clean room designed with prebuilt integrations to ad delivery platforms, just made its product available in the Google Cloud Marketplace.  The result will be easier deployment of Optable for Google Cloud customers.

CDP Zeotap has added the ability to include data not directly tied to an individual customer, including transactions, account information, and product catalog details.  The “Non-Customer Entity Data” feature broadens the amount of data available for segmentation and journey orchestration.  While not unique to Zeotap, it is still relatively rare.

Google has agreed to pay a $700 million fine to settle the multi-state lawsuit related to its app store payment processing system.  The figure includes $630 million to be paid to up to 102 million U.S. consumers to compensate for higher prices caused by Google’s approach.  Google still faces other anti-trust actions, notably the federal case still underway in Washington, DC.

Digital workflow company ServiceNow is buying task mining software company UltimateSuite. The deal will make it easier for users to identify tasks to automate.  It follows previous acquisitions by ServiceNow of data integration vendor G2K in May 2023 and AI experts Element AI in November 2020.

It may take a while for BigTech to realize that global regulators are not as deferential as they used to be.  Adobe just learned that the hard way – with a tuition of $1 billion in termination fees – when it agreed with Figma to abandon their proposed merger.  “Thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world” couldn’t convince authorities that their product design products are not competitive, and never could be.

Developers who build applications that run on someone else’s platform know they risk being knee-capped if the platform builds similar features into its core system.  Data clean room vendors received a reminder today when Snowflake announced it is purchasing Samooha, a system that simplifies clean room development on Snowflake.  Samooha was already a Snowflake partner but presumably the deal will allow them to create even tighter integrations.

Acquisitions by software vendors are often strategic, but don’t underestimate the allure of simple financial gain.  Analytics software vendor Alteryx, which has been a public company since 2017, has agreed to sell itself to private equity investors Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners.  The deal is valued at $4.4 billion, a 29.1% premium over the company’s closing share price last Friday.