CDP Institute

Current ad measurement champ Nielsen has been on the ropes but they did recently counterpunch with Streaming Signals, which promises to say who within a household is currently watching a connected TV show, so advertisers can bid on programmatic ads accordingly.  That would be a good trick but it seems they’re just making assumptions about the type of person who watches each show.  So the real trick is avoiding the term “contextual”.

Walled gardens don’t need to struggle with audience measurement because they already know who sees what.  NBCUniversal is taking advantage of that omniscience by launching NBCUnified, which integrates first-party data on 150 million individuals and 80 million households collected through movies, video, ecommerce, subscriptions, theme parks, and heaven knows what else.  The data is enhanced with third party information and made available for ad targeting.

CDP BlueConic has sold a majority share to Vista Equity Partners, whose high-profile martech investments have included Drift, Gainsight, Marketo, and many more.  No details were announced but the deal gives BlueConic resources to compete against increasingly well-funded industry leaders.

CDP Algonomy announced a deal to buy Linear Squared, which offers AI-based retail demand planning and forecasting.  It’s a good example of a vertical CDP expanding its industry-specific features.  Algonomy is the renamed combination of campaign CDP Manthan and recommendation engine RichRelevance, who announced their combination in late 2019 and closed that deal in early 2021.

Merkle, which offers a slew of marketing services including CDP delivery, is moving deeper into operational territory with a pair of products to support contactless shopping.  Scan & Go lets in-store shoppers make an online purchase via ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce.  UnboxIt reads QR codes on boxes to connect shoppers with instructions, customer support, loyalty programs, or I suppose anything else.  The big selling point is that shoppers don’t need to download a dedicated app.

Publishers mourning the loss of third party cookies have moved past acceptance to the previously undocumented stage of glee.  An amazing 70% in this Adweek survey said they saw the end of third party cookies as beneficial.  Surely related: 36% said relationships with Big Tech have gotten worse in the past two years.  First-party data and contextual ads are tied as the priorities for making it happen; data issues are the biggest challenges.  Download for details.

It’s not just publishers who see gold in their first party data.  Retail media platforms were arguably the biggest advertising news in 2021.  This year promises more of the same, with Best Buy kicking off its own ad business.  And since a little virtue signaling never hurts, they’ve also announced they’d devote 10% of their own media spend to BIPOC media by 2025.  If you don’t know what BIPOC stands for, you’re not in the target audience.

Out of home media live even farther outside the Big Tech walled gardens.  Atmosphere, which offers ad-supported streaming TV displays in over 18,000 restaurants, gyms, doctor offices and other venues with captive audiences, just raised $100 million in equity plus debt to expand their business.  Targeting is based on context, geography, and demographics but not individual profiles.

The CDP industry is entering an even more competitive stage as established vendors fight to become dominant leaders, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update. The semi-annual study finds unprecedented fund-raising, accelerated growth by large firms, and an apparent slowdown in companies entering the industry. For further commentary, see this post in the Customer Experience Matrix blog.

India-based cloud communications platform Exotel has raised a $40 million Series D, bringing total funding to $87 million.  Oddly enough, Exotel doesn’t claim to provide a CDP to unify its cross-channel customer treatments.  Yet.

The news is so meager today that I’m tempted to amuse you with car-driving goldfish. But we are Serious People here, so instead I’ll report on the slow-motion bidding war for R.R.Donnelley. Readers of a certain age will recall when Donnelley’s printing operations made it a major force in the marketing industry. See: Ozymandias.

Happy New Year, Dear Reader.  The News Gods are still out but we always have surveys.  This one from Dynamic Yield assesses personalization maturity across eight dimensions and three geographic regions.  Technology lags culture and leadership but there’s progress: 31% say they can now personalize most digital interactions, up from just 10% the year before.