CDP Institute

One of the fascinating things about the CRM industry is that hundreds of systems survive even though they do roughly the same things.  The trick is finding a niche.  WATI has chosen a huge one: businesses reaching the two-billion-plus global WhatsApp users.  They just raised a $23 million Series B, bringing total funding to $31 million.

Google has responded to consumer requests for greater privacy by (wait for it) asking them to give up more data about what they consider private.  More precisely, they’ve expanded My Ad Center to let users define in more detail the kinds of ads they do and don’t want to see.  Responsible, diabolical, or a bit of both?  

CDP vendor Teavaro and the CDP Institute have launched a free online course on identity resolution. (Click here to register.)  The course is intended to help marketers and others make better decisions about identity resolution by providing a solid understanding of key concepts and issues. It is the first of several courses planned by the CDP Institute on customer data management topics.

A Maryland judge last week ruled that the state’s tax on digital advertising is illegal.  You can view it as a rare win by Big Tech against government efforts to curb its market power.  You could also see it as another victory in the right-wing judicial campaign to hobble government regulators, although that may not be the motivation in this case.

This Deloitte report finds that AI deployments are growing rapidly, with 79% of respondents reporting three or more full-scale deployments, up from 62% one year ago.  But Deloitte also finds that more organizations (21% vs 17% last year) have deployed many projects but had low outcomes.  Cost reduction is the most common successful outcome but AI applications are roughly as frequent in customer experience and marketing as in operations, finance, and human resources.

You surely don’t need reminding that investors have pulled back from martech and adtech companies recently.  But if you’re looking for gruesome details, GP Bullhound has lots of them in this sector report.  No promises that I did the math right, but my calculations show the weighted average martech stock dropped by 49% over the past year and the weighted average adtech stock dropped 46% if you exclude Alphabet and 32% if you include them.  Channel Advisor, The Trade Desk, and Weave did much better than most.

The drop in martech and adtech stocks certainly reflects over-all market conditions.  But it can’t help that 67% of SMB CMOs are overwhelmed by the volume of marketing data, according to this Adverity survey.  The biggest investment barriers are lack of knowledge about using the systems (27%), integration complexity (23%) and adoption (19%).

Marketing agencies owning their own technology goes in and out of style.  Today it’s on the upswing and digital marketing agency WebFX has joined the party by acquiring Nutshell, a B2B SMB CRM and email platform.  Nutshell will supplement the company’s existing platforms, including a reporting service that it calls a CDP.

AI-generated content vendor Jasper just announced a $125 million Series A, which brings its total funding to, um, $125 million.  They somehow accrued 70,000 paying customers on their own.  They also just launched a browser extension that can make suggestions about pretty much any website text, and text-to-image functionality.

It’s charming that the industry term for Wireless Internet Service Providers is WISPs.   If you already knew that, you probably know that Calix offers systems to support that industry and other types of broadband providers.  They just launched Marketing Cloud Plus, which lets providers enhance real-time customer data with demographic, psychographic, and geographic data.  It’s CDP-ish, so we can call it another example of an industry-specific CDP.

Foundry is the publishing and martech part of IDG, which also owns the IDC research firm and is itself owned by the Blackstone investment group.  They just released a contact-level intent data product based on information gathered from titles like CIO and Infoworld, 800+ annual events, and tech including KickFire and LeadSift.  It’s more evidence that the death of third party data is greatly exaggerated.

I wish I had several Snowflake news items today, so I could call it a blizzard and amuse myself for two seconds.  But all I have it this announcement that Optimove now allows direct access to Optimove data that’s stored in Snowflake.  I can still point out that every Snowflake instance is unique.