CDP Institute

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.

There’s a definite trend towards advertisers buying directly from media companies, but there’s also still a lot of value in being able to buy through a single source.  The addressable TV industry is especially fragmented.  Invidi Technologies, which provide ad tech to many networks, has launched a unified campaign solution called Conexus to help.

Podcasting powerhouse Audacy (formerly Entercom) is simplifying life for companies that buy audio ads on its programs with a digital audience network that will let them buy audience segments rather than individual programs. The company says the segments will include more than 60 million consumers.

LinkedIn has purchased advertising analytics startup Oribi, which helps companies to measure website conversions.  The move will support LinkedIn’s burgeoning “marketing solutions” business, which the company said grew 43% year-on-year.  I think “marketing solutions” means advertising.

Metadata.io calls itself “the operating system for B2B marketers”, which is a bit grandiose.  But what they do, which is use AI to automate and optimize paid ad campaigns, including lead enrichment, is still pretty impressive.  They just raised a $40 million Series B to do more of it.

Salesforce announced a deal to buy Traction on Demand, a consultancy specializing in building solutions on Salesforce platforms.  They’re reportedly the largest in the industry, with about 1,500 people if LinkedIn has it right.  We don’t usually report on consultancy acquisitions, but this does give an idea of what Salesforce thinks will drive more sales.

You have to admire the tenacity of adtech folk trying to salvage their ability to target individuals.  The Trade Desk and LiveRamp have announced a plan work with Eureopan partners to build a GDPR-complaint identity solution, EUID.  The foundations will be LiveRamp’s RampID and The Trade Desk-developed Unified ID 2.0.  In theory, it’s all based on consented, first-party data, but newly-aggressive European regulators may take a closer look than they have in the past.