CDP Institute

Simon Data hilariously styles itself “the first connected CDP”, implying that other CDPs are not connected to anything. Marketing silliness aside, their point is they read data from a cloud data warehouse rather than building a dedicated CDP data store.  They just raised a $54 million Series D, bringing total funding to $115.8 million.

The build vs buy debate never grows old, although it does get tiresome.  MarTech’s 2023 Replacement Survey suggests the buy team is winning handily: 90% of martech replacements were commercial applications.  Anyone suffering through lengthy procurement cycles will be surprised that respondents say 73% of replacement projects are approved in six months or less.

Measurement is one of main casualties of cookie deprecation.  Haus fills part of the gap by helping marketers configure on-demand experiments using only first party data and applying causal inference to explain the results.  They just raised a $17 million Series A, bringing total funding to $22.9 million.

Meta Threads, which reached 100 million users faster than any application in history, has had an equally historic fall, losing 80% of daily active users within one month.  It may bounce back as Meta adds new Twitter-like features, but nothing is certain.  Radical thought: maybe the world doesn’t need Twitter or a Twitter replacement.

Contact center vendor Five9 has purchased Aceyus, a tool that collects data from multiple sources and makes it available for real-time analytics and personalized experiences.  This might land them in CDP territory, but we’d have to look more closely. Price was reported as $82 million.

Social media management platform Sprout Social is buying Tagger Media, an influencer marketing and social intelligence vendor, for $140 million.  Tagger was founded in 2015 and had raised $23.5 million.

Online event platform Hopin, once among the hottest of Covid-fueled tech ventures, has sold its core event and session products to RingCentral.  Price was not disclosed but is unlikely to have equaled the $1 billion invested in Hopin.

Amazon’s ad business continues to grow, reaching $10.7 billion the second quarter of 2023, up 22% from the same quarter last year.  Amazon still trails Meta ($32 billion for the quarter, up 11%) and Alphabet ($58 billion for the quarter, up 3% ) but the gap is closing.

TikTok’s ad revenue, variously estimated at $13.2 billion or $18.0 billion for all of 2023, doesn’t come close to Amazon, let alone Google or Meta.  But the company is working to grow it.  Its latest effort is a cookieless ad targeting tool called PrivacyGo.   It takes a data clean room-type approach with the additional privacy-protecting features.

Lytics has added a new module, Vault, for data governance and privacy management. Features include data encryption, consent management, and a data clean room. It’s all accessed through a unified interface.

Junior marketers are more active users of AI than their seniors (71% vs 64%), according to this survey from The Conference Board. But juniors are also more worried that AI will harm work quality (31% vs. 14%), creativity (49% vs 21%) and innovation (26% vs 7%). Among all respondents, 40% expect AI will reduce the number of jobs.

It’s not just marketers who are worried about the impact of tech. This Utimaco survey of global consumer attitudes found that 41% believe a connected world would make life easier but a substantial 34% disagreed. U.S. consumers were even more pessimistic, with more thinking a connected world would be bad (39%) than good (37%). Just 19% of respondents said they don’t worry about data security.