Finally, relationship intelligence vendor Affinity has raised a $26.5 million Series B. Affinity scans data such as emails, contact lists, and calendar events to measure relationships and identify opportunities. Yes, there’s tons of artificial intelligence under the hood.
In-app programmatic advertising is substantially more prone to fraud and wasted impressions than Web-based ads. This according to a study from Lucidity, which uses a blockchain-based technique to verify ad metrics. While 96% of Web impressions were confirmed by all members of the ad supply chain, just 65% of in-app ads were. Non-confirmed impressions are likely to be fraudulent or wasted. Confirmation rates improved substantially when placements were optimized to avoid discrepancies, which implies (but doesn’t prove) that performance improved as well.
Enough fancy technology. Small businesses need simpler solutions. Constant Contact is addressing that world with a new Marketing Advisor program that will include actual human contact (well, 30 minutes on the phone each month) to help small business marketers figure out what to do and then do it.
The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.