CDP Institute

Let’s go for $400.  “Holman invests in Orbee, a CDP and marketing platform for auto dealers.”  The question: “Are industry-focused CDPs becoming more common?”

What the heck – let’s do minor stories for $1,000.  “73% of consumers have security concerns about opening email from brands they don’t know.”   Hmm, that’s a tough one.  How about “What’s one reason more marketers are using snail mail for customer acquisition?”  Well played.

Are you tired of hearing about retail media networks yet, Dear Reader?  I find a wonky fascination in watching players fill each niche as a new industry evolves.  Latest is a In-Store Marketplace, which offers “a consistent, ubiquitous, single-point of integration for any in-store Retail Media platform.”  Ownership is unclear but it seems to be run by a consortium of retail media agencies aiming to provide unified inventory.

There’s definite overlap between retail media and out-of-home advertising, and ads on hired vehicles are a bit of both.  Right on cue, here’s a birth announcement for Lyft Media, which will offer ads on top of vehicles, inside of vehicles, within the Lyft app, and even on Lyft-owned bikeshare docks.  Ads will be targeted by location, not at individuals, so this leans more towards the out-of-home side.

Outbound marketing platform Iterable has launched a new AI Optimization Suite, whose main features are letting non-technical users create custom predictive models and see which inputs drive those models.  This sort of thing isn’t quite table stakes but it’s becoming more common.  Iterable collects and activates unified customer data in ways that seem CDP-ish, although we haven’t classified them as one…yet.

CDP CleverTap has raised a $105 million Series D, bringing more than doubling total funding to $182 million.  You may recall that CleverTap bought personalization vendor Leanplum in late May of this year.  It’s another sign that martech funding hasn’t totally dried up.

Cordial also bucked the funding trends last month with a $50 million raise.  Today they’re back in the news with integrations with CDPs Amperity, mParticle and Segment.   While Cordial itself qualifies as a CDP, its focus is primarily on cross-channel engagement.  Connections between data-focused CDPs and engagement-focused CDPs are more common than many people realize.

Klaviyo had its own funding event recently, a $100 million investment by Shopify.  Today’s item is less pleasant: a data breach involving an unspecified amount of consumer data.  The breach apparently resulted from a phishing attack, as did the Twilio breach we reported yesterday. It’s possible the same attackers are to blame.

There’s lots of interesting data  in this Ascend2 report on multi-channel marketing, but what stood out for me was that measurement was cited as essential for success by far more respondents (61%) than other factor.  Next highest was integrated technology at a meager 43%, and unified data was last at 27%.  Now you know we write so much about measurement products.

Data breaches are common in general but rare at martech vendors.  So it’s newsworthy that Twilio reported a breach, although it seems the only compromised data was about Twilio’s own clients, not about the clients’ customers.  The breaches were due to garden variety phishing attacks, not technical flaws in Twilio security, which I somehow find comforting.

Data integration platform Equalum announced a $14 million Series C, bringing total funding to $39 million.  Equalum positions itself as a no-code pipeline for all data ingestion, transformation, and integration tasks.  That includes real-time change data capture, streaming data capture, batch loads, and replication.

Greater public attention to privacy has reduced trust in all tech providers, including those like Apple and Google that have positioned themselves as privacy-friendly.  Apple’s rank in Jebbit’s annual Consumer Data Trust Index fell from 17 to 43, while Google fell from number 4 to 89.  Amazon fell just slightly, from first to fourth place, while Facebook actually improved a bit from 97 to 88.