CDP Institute

The Use Case Generator is built with Google Forms, which I guess qualifies as a no-code system.  This Forrester report says we’re not alone: 60% of organizations are using low-code and they’re twice as likely to grow as non-users.  One big surprise: 49% are using low-code to build core software such as ERP and CRM.

Sales enablement vendor Mediafly is buying deal intelligence collector InsightSquared.  The pair expect InsightSquared data to help optimize Mediafly content and recommendations.  Sounds like fun.

Identity resolution vendor Infutor has launched a solution to link IP-based connected TV (CTV) identities to offline household attributes in its 120 million household database.  The deal will help marketers select and target CTV audiences, but doesn’t provide identifiers of household members.

Here’s something to debate if your holiday party gets boring: are golf cart screens out of home (OOH) media or connected TVs?  Apparently, the answer is OOH, since programmatic OOH ad seller Place Exchange just inked a deal to sell ads on 33,000 interactive golf cart screens. Extra trivia points: the screens are managed by Shark Experience, which was developed by champion golfer Greg Norman.

If connected golf carts aren’t weird enough for you, let’s just discard reality altogether and generate videos with synthetic people. That’s what Synthesia has been doing for several years, and now offer at the crazy-low cost of $30 per month for up to ten minutes. You can try it for free here or see my own attempt here. They just raised 50 million presumably real dollars.

It’s a quiet news day, Dear Reader. The most excitement I can offer is a $165 million Series H from integration platform SnapLogic, which brings total funding to $371 million and values them at $1 billion. That’s nice but you already knew that integration is a booming industry.

We do have some nice data news left over from last week, when LiveRamp announced it has connected its identity graph with Lotame.  The deal will let Lotame customers access LiveRamp’s person ID, expanding their options for cross-channel audience selection and measurement.

Also from last week, “external data platform” Explorium is making its collection of third-party data sets available in the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Explorium collects “thousands” of data signals from all sorts of places and makes it easy to match them against a company’s own customer, prospect, and other data.

Global warming.  Rampant authoritarianism.  Endless pandemic.  It’s impressive that some people find time to worry about measuring TV audiences.  So thumbs up to OpenAP, which just launched a framework to target and measure all types of TV audiences and signed up a slew of media agencies, media companies, and measurement vendors to cooperate.  Called XPm, the platform lets advertisers work with an audience of 290 million identities, which can be linked with other firms’ first-party data in various privacy-safe ways.

In other obscure but probably important adtech news, Criteo is negotiating a $380 million deal to buy IPONWEB, a major developer of ad exchange, marketplace, and bidding technologies.  The deal will help Criteo replace its third-party-cookie-based retargeting business with something more suited to the future – possibly using retail media networks as an alternative to the Facebook/Google/Amazon walled gardens.

Back on more familiar turf, how about a nice Adobe study that reports marketers are struggling to get value from technology?  Yup, 65% say they feel their productivity is harmed by having too many technology options and 65% also say they can’t keep up with tech changes.  Despite the problems, 79% say they regularly use data to make marketing decisions and 77% use it to demonstrate marketing’s value to the rest of the business.  Download for more.

The Boris Yelstin Presidential Center doesn’t come up very often in this newsletter, so I’m pleased to report that Mindbox, a Moscow-based integrated marketing systemn and CDP vendor that counts the Yelstin Center among its clients, has raised a $13 million investment to fuel its growth and international expansion.  Boris would be proud.