CDP Institute

If being stalked by ads isn’t creepy enough for you, how about being stalked by interactive ads?  Daily just raised a $40 million Series B to bring that particular vision to life, by providing an API that lets users embed audio and video connections into just about everything.  I guess that includes newsletters like this one.  Click here to discuss.

Were you hoping for something even more intrusive?  Well, if we ever get back to in-person events, you can wear a badge from Klik that tracks your physical movements, enables touchless exchange of contact information, and can send helpful recommendations about sessions to attend or people to meet.  Klik was just bought by event management platform vendor Bizzabo.

If robots wrote the news, would they write about other robots?  I ask because there’s been a suspicious burst of items about AI-powered writing tools, just when live journalists might have set things on autopilot so they could sneak out early for the holiday.  Top of the list: writing-suggestion platform Grammarly just raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation, doubling total funding to $400 million.

Also recently, marketing copy generator Anyword raised $21 million, bringing its total to $30 million. They say their system can be trained to copy your brand voice and/or to tailor copy versions for different customer segments. Just a few days before that, writing assistant Writer reported its own $21 million round. Then we have this (hilarious) piece about – and partly by – writing assistant Sudowrite and its $3 million seed round.

I’d finish with news that Salesforce is buying article writer Narrative Science, but we covered that last week. So I’ll switch to other messaging, where API-friendly communications platform Vonage was just purchased by Ericsson for $6.2 billion. Martech vendors like Twilio are Vonage competitors.

OpenText, which provides a range of content, document, security, and experience management solutions, is buying email security vendor Zix for $860 million.  The company says it will add Zix to SMB data protection platform, which is based on its 2019 acquisition of Carbonite and Webroot.

We don’t write much about SMB (Small and Mid-size Business) products.  But now that I’ve raised the subject, SMB payments and communications platform Podium has raised a $201 million Series D, bringing total funding to $419 million.  Podium started as a review-generation platform, but its ability to accept payments within text messages is what’s unusual.

Yelp reviews are a foundation for many SMB marketing programs, so it’s on-topic today.  But their actual news is a man-bites-dog reversal: Yelp has just launched two ad units that let national brands promote themselves by highlighting local companies that carry their goods.  Sponsored Collections show ads organized around a theme while Seasonal Spotlight ads present a rotating sample of brand holiday campaigns.

Retail media includes both ads on ecommerce web sites like Amazon (boring) and ads on retail media network sites owned by retailers like Albertsons, Lowes, and Best Buy (fun!).  Leave it to eMarketer to put things in perspective with a report that ecommerce ads account for just under 90% of the total $31.5 billion that will be spent on U.S. retail media in 2021, leaving the nascent retail ad networks with a fairly minor $3 billion or so.   That’s just 2% of the $150 billion total U.S. digital ad spend.

Like the gold rush merchants who made more money selling shovels than the prospectors who bought them, digital analytics vendors have built a very profitable niche.  Mixpanel is one of the leaders, and they just raised a $200 million Series C to continue that growth.  The deal brings their total funding to $277 million and puts their valuation at $1.05 billion.

ThoughtSpot also sells tools to data miners.  Their special power is letting users query cloud databases in natural language.  They just brought their total funding to $674 million with a $100 million Series F at a $4.2 billion valuation.

Aqfer offers a suite of highly-scalable SaaS tools that include a data collection tag, customer database, real-time data access, and identity graph manager.  It sells these to integrators, agencies, data compilers, and other firms that want to control their own system rather than buying a packaged CDP.  They just raised an $11 million Series A to help explain it more clearly than I just did.