CDP Institute

Wunderman Thompson reports that 45% of global consumers are interested in shopping after they are dead. Puts a whole new spin on “richest person in the graveyard.” Less surprising but still interesting: 32% of online spending in on mobile devices and 19% of everything ordered online is returned. There’s lots of regional detail here if you want it.

The clueless boss is a favorite meme in many circles, though probably not among bosses. This IBM survey offers some support, finding that 69% of CEOs believe generative AI will offer broad benefits to their organization but just 29% of their supporting executives feel their company has the expertise to make it work. Two-thirds of CEOs are acting without a clear view of how to help their workforce adjust the AI-created disruptions.

When Adobe announced planed to buy digital design platform Figma, the anti-trust issues were obvious to everyone except maybe Adobe. The U.S. and UK regulators announced investigations almost immediately. Now the European Commission has said it’s opening an investigation as well.

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.