CDP Institute

Jebbit lets people build interactive quizzes, surveys, lead generation forms and such.  They just received $70 million from Vista Equity Partners, which is noteworthy.  But I’m more intrigued that they position themselves a “zero-party data platform”, rather than a development tool.

Cloud data warehouse vendor Firebolt announced a $100 million Series C, just six months after a $127 million round last June.  Firebolt competes with Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery in a super-hot segment that’s increasingly relevant to CDPs.

Google has given up on its FLoC cookie-less targeting initiative, which faced insurmountable privacy objections. The replacement, which mercifully does not reference anything bird-related, is Topics API, which will offer three recent interests for each individual based on sites they have recently visited.  The loss in targeting and tracking power is so huge that you wonder if Google is purposely showing what tighter privacy is costing the industry. Or maybe they’re just kneecapping competitors.

When all the cookie dust has settled, contextual targeting may be the only way to reach mass audiences.  So let’s note that Precise TV, a “kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube”, has extended its reach to connected TV through a deal with video content classification vendor IRIS.TV.  Back in the day, all TV ad buys were fundamentally contextual, but that was when media buyers chose from, like, five channels.

Email offers precise targeting without cookies but anti-spam laws make it hard to reach new customers.  Portugal-based Emailbidding somehow gets around that problem with a service that lets advertisers bid on emails to external lists.  They were just bought by Berlin-based Audience Serv, which also sells email prospecting campaigns but apparently without the fancy bidding mechanism.

CDP Daily deals in just the facts, ma’am, so we weren’t going to write about the sure-to-be-changed Banning Surveillance Advertising Act introduced in Congress last week.  But the industry opposition has been so overwrought – 17 Million Jobs at Risk! The Internet Will Die! – that we feel a need to inject some reality. The clearest analysis I could find says the law allows targeting based on first party data but not third party data. What’s not clear whether publishers could use their own (first party) data to target ads... Read More >

Whatever happens with new privacy laws, marketers will need to deal with the loss of third party cookies and restrictions on data sharing.  Braze reports that 96% plan to increase marketing budgets, 42% plan to add new channels, and 38% will put more emphasis on zero- and first-party data.  Improved data management tops the list of brand concerns for 2022.

Jamie in our Department of the Obvious offers this study from The Predictive Index, which finds that companies who put the right people in the right roles, create remote-friendly and inclusive workplaces, and prioritize health benefits have significantly lower turnover than those that don’t.  Glad we straightened that out.

Do you miss those innocent days when every product announcement breathlessly reported the new system or feature was “AI-based”? If so, here’s a whiff of remembrance from AI infrastructure provider SambaNova Systems, who found that 78% of large companies rate AI and Machine Learning as important revenue drivers. Yet even they have a curiously mixed attitude, citing (in their press release) a NewVantage Partners study that found only a quarter of top companies have scaled AI/ML across their organization.

Meanwhile, this DataRobot study takes a darker view, reporting that 54% of tech leaders are concerned about AI bias, up from 42% in 2019.  A surprising (to me) 81% think government regulation would be helpful even though 45% also worry regulations would make adoption more difficult.  In a classic “not my problem” result, 90% are at least somewhat moderately confident that their own organization can identify AI bias.

Still dark and closer to home for marketers, IBM looked at AI bias in programmatic advertising.  Working with industry groups, they’ve released an open source toolkit AI Fairness 360 that can detect it.  They concluded potentially harmful bias does exist but were optimistic that technical cures could be found, although ad efficiency might suffer.

And then there were none: experience analytics vendor Medallia is buying Thunderhead, the last major independent journey orchestration platform.  Previous acquisitions in the field have included: Pointillist bought by Genesys in October 2021; Kitewheel acquired by CSG in July 2021; and Usermind acquired by Qualtrics, also in July 2021.