CDP Institute

Metadata management is about empowering technical people: if it has an opposite, it may well be integrated tools for business users.  Apollo.io has closed a $110 million Series C for its B2B sales prospecting platform, which combines a 220-million name B2B contact database with sales workflow automation.  The company says it has over 15,000 paying customers and is used by more than one million people over all.

How about a trio of Connected TV stories? App marketing platform AppLovin is spending $430 million to buy streaming TV distribution vendor Wurl, which will expand AppLovin’s footprint beyond apps. The Atedra media buying platform has integrated its inventory with Datonics’ audience data, which includes search, intent, life-stage, behavioral, and other information. And, advertising analytics vendor Kantar has partnered with live TV streaming platform fuboTV to measure the impact of fuboTV campaigns on brand metrics.

Lots of measurement news today, Dear Reader.  Here’s a $121 million Series D from Insider, which connects data across all channels and uses AI to predict customer behavior and select optimal journeys and messages for each individual.  The “connect data across all channels” sounds a lot like a CDP, but they don’t seem to be sharing the results with other systems.

Datafuelx also uses customer data to make AI-based predictions.  Their particular focus is ad buying.  They just launched with two products: precisionX, which creates customer ID files grouped by predicted ad exposure levels, to enable supplemental targeting; and outcome, which estimates business results from outcome data sets and uses them to predict the impact of media plans for linear TV.

Naviga offers publishers a collection of tools to build content, sell ads, and target content.  They just bought Abacus, which offers somewhat overlapping services for subscription-based businesses.  It even includes what they call a Customer Data Platform, which creates a single customer view.

Treasure Data has launched a “test drive” offering an AWS Marketplace.  The one-month, $39,000 subscription includes help from Treasure Data engineers to prove selected use cases.  Treasure Data is far from the only CDP on AWS Marketplace, although this sort of test drive is less common.

Companies looking to build their own CDP-equivalent often start with Snowflake as their base, but soon find there’s a lot of development required to deliver a complete solution. Snowflake just made things a little easier by buying Streamlit, an open-source framework that helps developers and data scientists to build data apps. Price was reported as $800 million.

Even deeper in the technical weeds, data transformation framework dbt Labs raised a $222 million Series D, bringing total funding to $414 million.  Dbt lets users create programs that it translates into SQL code for database management.  Their vision is to create a “semantic layer” that translates between applications and an underlying cloud database.  How exciting is that?

It can be hard to find a bright side in the news these days, but we try. So, while this Epsilon report finds that most marketers feel post-cookie changes will hurt their companies without helping consumer privacy, we’ll instead note that 67% are building a CDP to help address the problem. Similarly, Wiland reports that only 23% of companies have a post-cookie targeting solution in place, but we’ll point out that 66% are looking at first party data and 65% at contextual advertising as targeting alternatives.

Cheerful people focus on solutions, right?  Here’s news that Nielsen is adding Experian’s persistent IDs to its post-cookiepocalypse Nielsen ID system.  The deal will improve Nielsen’s ability to match person-level data to devices for measurement purposes.  Nielsen calibrates the results with information from its consumer panels.

Relentlessly accentuating the positive, we’ll share that LiveRamp has made its online identity capabilities available in Snowflake’s Media Data Cloud.   If you didn’t know Snowflake had a Media Data Cloud: it’s a “connected ecosystem” of identity, activation, measurement, technology, and data solutions, which they launched last October.

The Disney brand is so strong it’s easy to forget that they are a major media company.  But they are, and Disney Advertising this week announced new partners for its previously-launched data clean room.  Future plans include using Disney’s proprietary audience graph for ad bidding and insights, and interoperability with industry programmatic solutions.