CDP Institute

AI plays a big role in this Yahoo announcement, which describes how they’ll use it to put anonymous website visitors into audiences based on how closely they resemble identified users.  As they describe it, Next-Gen Audiences “considers a mix of real-time signals received on the bid request, including content, location, weather, device type, and more” to build anonymous audiences that are more effective than content-based targeting alone.  No cookies or persistent user profiles are involved.  Today’s news is they’ve extended this from in-app inventory to web advertising.

Back in the world of identified web visitors, Nielsen is adding demographic data from The Trade Desk to profiles in the Nielsen Identity System, starting with France, Italy, and the UK.  Other Asian, European, and non-U.S. markets will follow.  The arrangement will enrich Nielsen’s cross-media measurement reporting.

The head-spinning world of advertising privacy got even dizzier today when Google announced a “multi-year initiative” to deploy Privacy Sandbox on Android.  Heaven knows what it really means but the general idea is they’re trying to limit sharing of personal data while still supporting some ad targeting.  Don’t confuse this announcement with one made last November, which recently resurfaced, about letting publishers share pseudonymized first-party IDs with programmatic ad bidders through something called Encrypted Signals for Publishers.

Content personalization vendor Movable Ink announced a deal to buy Coherent Path, which helps companies guide customers to buying products they haven’t tried before.  The deal nicely complements Movable Ink’s core business, which it automatically adjusting messaging within digital content every time the user opens it.

Trust (41%) now outweighs even convenience (38%) and reliability (35%) as consumers’ top priority when picking a business, according to this ActionIQ survey.  Personalization rates a distant 17%.  The primary finding of the study is the companies consistently overestimate customer satisfaction with their experience.  Lots of fun detail here by industry and experience type.

Today’s news is all about easing frustrations.  We’ll start with OpenPath from ad buying platform The Trade Desk, which lets advertisers avoid the usual programmatic bucket brigade and buy direct from premium publishers.  It’s a sign of how frustrated everyone is with the current adtech briar patch.

Validity is helping frustrated sales teams with GridBuddy Connect, a friendly-sounding tool that shows data from multiple sources on a single screen.  It seems the data is presented side-by-side rather than being truly integrated, but that’s better than nothing.  The system “understands” its data sources so users can create their own view without writing any code.

Analytics platform DataSelf has launched a new version of its data loading system, designed to remove the frustrations of constantly changing data sources.  They’re a bit vague on what’s different but say it took four years to build, so let’s assume it’s a major improvement.

Let’s chase some money today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with a $300 Series F funding for Branch, bringing total funding to $667 million.  Branch lets marketers create links that point users on all platforms to specific locations within their app, and measures how different options are working.  Sounds simple but it’s not.

Not far behind, data connection company Starburst announced a $250 million Series D, for a total of $414 million.  Starburst lets companies create write SQL queries that join data from different sources in a data lake, data warehouse, data mesh, or other data mess.  It doesn’t do the complicated data preparation you’d want in a CDP.

Off in the distance, we see a mere $55 million Series C for Radar, which had raised $35 million previously.  Barely seems worth mentioning but they’re a geofencing platform, which you may find interesting.  Capabilities include alerts when people enter a defined area, tracking movement towards a destination, and applying geocodes.  Fun, fun, and more fun.

You might prefer chocolate, but our Valentines gift to you is a matched set of CDP Institute reports on the CDP markets in Europe and Asia Pacific. The APAC report cites the pandemic and privacy regulations as causing explosive industry growth, with a 50% increase in employment in the past twelve months. The European market is more mature, with a still-impressive 22% year-on-year employment increase. Reports were written by AZK Media (APAC) and Adapt Clear Value (Europe) and sponsored by Treasure Data, which had no influence on the contents.