CDP Institute

Closer to home for CDP watchers, ecommerce and analytics platform Daasity has raised a $15 million Series A.  Daasity loads sales, customer, and inventory data into a standard data model that is easily available for personalized messaging as well as merchandising, inventory management, and other non-marketing activities.  It probably qualifies as a CDP.

Zagging back towards pure analytics, landing page optimizer Unbounce has purchased LeadsRX, which does lead attribution based data from digital, radio, TV, podcasts, and streaming services.  I guess we can call it a footprint expansion for Unbounce, so one more vote in favor of consolidated products over assemble-your-own components.

It was just a matter of time before the cloud database vendors positioned themselves as CDPs, and it seems that time is now. Databricks just launched a “data lakehouse” for retail and consumer goods customers that promises to unify customer data and do analytics such as personalized product recommendations. That announcement doesn’t mention “CDP” but this recent post by them does. Google Cloud also has a page devoted to its CDP solution, although I never saw it announced.

Data assembly and analytics platform Alteryx doesn’t position itself as a CDP although it might qualify.  They did just upgrade their cloud data chops by just spent $400 million to purchase data management tool vendor Trifacta.  There’s considerable feature overlap but Trifacta is natively cloud-based while Alteryx is not.

Integration platform Jitterbit is also expanding through acquisition, in this case buying low-code development vendor PrimeApps.  More apps means more demand for integration, right?

We haven’t seen many recent acquisitions by CDP vendors, although that may change as they start to spend all the money they’ve been raising. mParticle is first out of the gate with the purchase of Indicative, a customer journey analytics system.  Analytics is a logical next step beyond mParticle’s current positioning as a data-focused CDP.

Most marketers have stopped hyperventilating about the death of third-party cookies, in part because it’s increasingly clear that they’ll still be able to target individuals when cookies are naught but a fond memory.  Streaming media such as connected TV, audio, and gaming are among the places where targeting doesn’t rely on cookies.  Acxiom is helping with a new deal to make its marketing audiences available for targeting in TransUnion’s TruAudience Data Marketplace.   Do you feel better now?

B2B marketers have been upping their data game recent years.  But this Openprise survey of revops leaders finds they still have a long way to go.  Just 34% said they’re “very confident” in their company’s data onboarding and list loading processes, and data quality is their top worry.

We know that digital out of home ads, delightfully called DOOH, are hot.  So hot, in fact, that T-Mobile just bought a Octopus Interactive, which has an ad network of screens inside rideshare vehicles.  The screens will be replaced by T-Mobile devices, extending T-Mobile’s Magenta Audience Network of more than 100 million mobile customers.

Connected TVs, or CTV to the cool kids, is another hot ad channel.  Data marketplace Datonics has mapped 110 million households to IP addresses, and linked the households to search, intent, life-stage, behavior, demographics, purchases and other information.  It’s now providing that data to programmatic adtech vendor Simpli.fi, which will use it to build standard and custom ad segments.

Like most people, you’re probably wondering whether the growth of B2B online buying has reduced the importance of Requests for Proposals.  This Loopio study offers mixed evidence: it found more companies plan to issue RFPs in 2022, even though the share of revenue generated by RFPs has fallen from 41% in 2019 to 33% in 2021.  The reason might be that online portals make it easier to send RFPs.

CDP users are highly gruntled, according to Tealium’s just-released “2022 State of the CDP Report”: 70% of respondents reported positive Return on Investment within six months and 96% within one year.  More surprising: regulatory compliance was the top reason to buy a CDP, ahead of real time data collection, supporting other tech investments, and individual-level targeting.  Download for more.