CDP Institute

CDPs that specialize in a single industry have been a trend for some time.  The latest is Ikue, which is built for telecom operators and follows an industry-standard data model from TM Forum.  Telecom has been relatively slow to adopt CDPs due to regulatory concerns and the sheer volume of data involved.

Ok, here’s a crazy coincidence: we have news from another CDP that specializes in telecom.  Intent HQ has launched an AI-driven audience builder that finds hidden opportunities within a customer base.  The tool doesn’t require data scientist support and lets marketers choose from a list of predictive indicators to model against.  It uses other Intent HQ features to automatically ensure the audience data is privacy-compliant.

Lots of people want to help retailers compete with Amazon. Swiftly Systems offers tools for online and instore promotions plus retail media networks.  They just announced their second $100 million funding round in six months.

Instacart is also manning the anti-Amazon barricades. They just launched Connected Stores, an initiative that helps retailers compete with Amazon’s no-checkout technology. Clients also get an online component and lots of fresh customer data. Success isn’t guaranteed: Wegmans recently dropped a self-scanning program due to high shoplifting costs.

How big are the ecommerce and retail media pies?  GroupM estimates retail media at $101 billion for 2022, or 11% of global ad revenue, and ecommerce at 19% of all retail sales.  Amazon actually ranks second to Alibaba in total ecommerce revenue, and only three of the top ten ecommerce companies are based in the US.

This Ascend2 report on data-driven marketing holds some surprises.  Personalization (46%) turns out rank behind customer experience (58%) as the most important trend for the next year, while predictive analytics (28%) is ranks lower than improved data integration (33%).  AI and machine learning are dead last at 10%.

Here’s another unexpected result: Demandbase finds that just 23% of B2B marketers see free trials as their most important tool for attracting new customers, ranking far behind interactive features including product tours (46%), interactive demos (45%) and online calculators (43%).  You may or may not be surprised that missing (59%) and dirty (56%) data are the biggest data challenges while disconnected sources are cited by just 40%.

The folks at “no-code product adoption platform” Chameleon probably know how important interactive tools are, since they make it easier for SaaS products to deploy banners, tool tips, models, checklists, walkthroughs, help searches, and similar interactions.  They just raised a $13 million Series A.   Just to be clear: Chameleon adds elements on top of a SaaS product without changing how the product itself works.

We’ve been writing recently about Amazon battling with Shopify for the business of online merchants, but Amazon is also fighting against Walmart.  The latest news from that front is Walmart’s release of new self-service tools for advertisers in its online Marketplace.  This overlaps with the retail media network wars if you’re keeping track.

Analytics technology vendor Altair just bought RapidMiner, which offers desktop and cloud machine learning tools.  The two product lines overlap but RapidMiner specializes in low-code solutions and says it has over one million users.  Price was not announced.

Adobe last week announced a $20 billion half-cash, half-stock deal to buy Figma, a web-native, collaborative graphic design platform that competes with several important Adobe products. The price is more than 200x Figma’s 2021 revenue although Adobe said it expected Figma revenue to more than quadruple to a $400 million annual run rate by the end of fiscal 2022. That’s much faster than Adobe’s current 13% growth rate although it’s still a small fraction of Adobe’s roughly $17 billion revenue.

CDP ActionIQ has decoupled its data storage and data extract features by launching HybridCompute, which can query data without first loading it into ActionIQ’s own data store.  The company has connectors in place for Snowflake, Databricks, and Teradata, and plans to add Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Microsoft Azure.   They describe the approach with the oh-so-trendy term “composable customer data stack”.