Dentsu’s Merkle group also had its origins in the 1970’s. They just signed a deal for Adobe to integrate Merkle’s Merkury identity resolution platform. It’s another move to strengthen first party data capabilities as third party data becomes harder to find.
Two major trends in the CDP industry have been emergence of industry specialists and of CDPs built into operational platforms. Right on cue, ticketing platform TicketIQ has launched FanIQ, which creates unified customer profiles and markets against them. Whether it’s a CDP depends on whether other systems can also access its data. FanIQ also taps into TicketIQ’s 40 million user profiles, matching yet another trend: integration of third party prospect lists.
Connected TV viewing was never measured by third party cookies, but it still needs a tracking solution. TVision measures the attention paid by individual TV viewers, apparently through devices in the homes of volunteers. They’ve just launched a new platform that measures results across all streaming apps. Don’t confuse this TVision (www.tvisioninsights.com) with the TVision internet streaming service just launched by T-Mobile.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)