CDP Institute

Out-of-home ad platform AdQuick is partnering with LiveRamp to target physical and digital out-of-home ads based on first-party data.  The targeting is at the group level: marketers send anonymized first-party audience lists to AdQuick, which uses LiveRamp’s identity graph to find locations where the same people or look-alike audiences are most likely to be found.  Sales data can also be added to the mix to measure results.

If you think you spotted a trend of connecting ads with sales results, you’re right.  Nielsen is headed in the same direction with its Nielsen ONE Alpha cross-platform measurement solution, which will combine details on ad campaign reach, frequency, and audience characteristics with the advertiser’s sales data.  At least, that’s the plan: the features won’t be available in real life until next year at the earliest.

We don’t usually report rumors and this item is a couple of days old.  But it’s huge news so I wanted you to see it.  The specific item is that, to avert EU anti-trust action, Alphabet may drop its requirement that YouTube ads be placed through its Ad Manager and Google Ads products.  What makes it huge is the implication that regulators may finally start to take serious action against Big Tech monopolies.

Microsoft is a charter member of the Big Tech club, but testing a retail marketplace within its Bing search engine makes it sound like a scrappy upstart nipping at the ankles of Amazon and Google.  The new marketplace will let consumers buy within the search results instead of sending them to retailers’ websites.    Details are sketchy but the marketplace may do targeting with information gathered by other Microsoft products – which puts the story back into the “Big Tech exploiting your data” department.

At $4+ billion revenue, Shopify is big but not Big Tech.  But it’s taking a page from the Big Tech playbook with Audiences, which will aggregate customer behaviors from participating merchants to develop target audiences that can then reached through Facebook and LinkedIn.  The new feature will help to overcome the loss in targeting capabilities resulting from Apple’s tighter privacy rules.  

Adobe announced several enhancements to its Real-Time CDP, including automatic enforcement of consumer privacy preferences and company data access policies, clean-room-like audience matching, predictive account and lead scoring, and tighter integration with Adobe Commerce.  Meanwhile, a separate announcement about enhancements to Adobe Analytics described it as the “single workspace for brands to unify data and insights across all media types”, which sounds CDP-ish. It’s a reminder that Adobe sees its CDP as one of several tools to access unified customer profiles stored in a separate platform layer.

Neustar has launched Marketing and Analytics Clean Room, following the industry trend of utterly generic product names. Despite the name, Neustar says its product is a “first-of-its-kind solution” that uses advanced identity resolution, machine learning, and privacy-enhancing technology to combine first, second, and third party data from many marketing and media sources including connected TV and walled gardens.

CDP Blueshift has released a bi-directional integration with cloud data platform Snowflake, making it easier to load Snowflake data into the Blueshift profile database and to post Blueshift data into Snowflake.  The dozens of other announcements from Snowflake’s Summit conference included integrations with data clean room products from Habu, Acxiom, and Aidentified, and a tighter connection with reverse ETL product Hightouch.

Privacy tech is a fast-growing industry, as well as an increasingly important use case for CDPs. So it was a shock yesterday to see OneTrust lay off nearly 1,000 people – one-quarter of its staff – despite $926 million total funding. Let’s balance that with last week’s news that Immuta, which helps companies enforce complex data access policies, raised a $100 million Series E, bringing its total raise to $258 million.

It’s not exactly news when a CDP vendor integrates with an identity resolution platform, since it happens all the time.  But we did report last week when Salesforce announced a dozen or so new integrations for its CDP via AppExchage.  So let’s be fair and note that Tealium announced an integration with Merkle’s Merkury cookieless identity resolution and data enhancement product.

Blockgraph is another cookieless identity resolution vendor.  It has an intriguing backstory as a Comcast spin-off now jointly owned with Charter and Paramount, and enabling privacy-safe data sharing and TV ad targeting.  Blockgraph just partnered with FullThrottle, which collects first-party data for its clients.  FullThrottle clients will map their data to Blockgraph households for ad targeting and measurement.

Mom always said you need standards, right?  Be sure to tell her the Media Ratings Council has just released a draft framework for “outcomes” measures such as funnel metrics, attribution, media mix models, and lift testing. The proposal also covers data quality and privacy. At 53 pages, it’s not light reading but it does illustrate just how hard it is to do measurement right.