CDP Institute

GoodData has chimed news that self-service insights are the top priority for 2022, cited by 45% of companies.  No surprise there, but you may not realize how far that goal is from reality: business users manage their own data and analytics at just 25% of companies.  It’s managed by IT at 38% and a separate data or business intelligence department at 37%.

Looking even deeper into the minds of IT leaders, Dataversity finds that the number of data silos is their biggest data management challenge, cited by 66%.  For all the fussing about privacy, it was tenth on the list, cited by just 26%.  Here’s the real surprise: plans to use “big data” are falling, as companies adopt cloud relational databases instead.  More here on data modeling, architectures, governance, metadata, and other geeky delights.

Every so often, the New Gods are unexpectedly generous. Today they gave us three pieces of interesting news, despite it being a pre-holiday week. First, Mastercard is buying personalization platform Dynamic Yield from McDonald’s, which itself purchased Dynamic Yield in 2019.  The acquisition will join CDP and loyalty system SessionM in Mastercard’s stable of CX services.

Also in the personalization biz, Optimizely’s Content Cloud is gaining access to Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud functions via “headless” API connections.  For example, all ecommerce site content can be managed via Content Cloud.  The integration doesn’t seem related to Optimzely’s acquisition of CDP Zaius last March, but I just like to mention it.

Here’s one more deal involving familiar names: AT&T is selling Microsoft its programmatic ad marketplace Xandr.  Microsoft gains a bigger role in the global adtech universe, reinforcing its position as an “open web” alternative to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.  Microsoft has a CDP too.

B2B data management vendor Integrate has sold a majority stake to a private equity firm.  Originally focused on moving leads between systems, Integrate now positions itself as a “precision demand marketing” company, whatever that may be.  The company had previously raised $80 million total, with its last round in 2018.

Rokt, which places ecommerce ads on ecommerce websites, just raised a $325 million Series E, bringing total funding to $487 million.  Rokt shows the ads to customers who have just completed a transaction, presumably reducing any risk to the site owner’s sales.  It works with many advertisers, which lets it optimize offers based on each customer’s behavior and context.

Location intelligence platform Carto has raised a $61 million Series C, bring its total to $92 million.  Carto offers both spatial analysis tools and more than 10,000 data sets organized at different geographic levels around the world.  Nearly half its data sets provide demographic information, so, yes, this is relevant to marketers.

mParticle has announced the beta release of a feature to forward data erase requests to integrated systems including Amplitude, Blueshift, Braze, and Kochava.  Such requests must be honored under many privacy regulations including the European Union’s GDPR, California’s CCPA/CPRA, and Brazil’s LGPD.  It’s one more example of how CDPs are overlapping with privacy management systems.

“Composability” is the latest buzzword for breaking up integrated systems into separate functions. This puts CDP vendors into competition of generic data management tools such as data integration systems. So it’s relevant to know that Hevo, a no-code data pipeline, just raised a $30 million Series B, bringing its total to $43 million. Also, that CData, a real-time connectivity platform, announced its own Series B, a $140 million round that raises its funding to $160 million.

Connecting social media measurement with traditional media measurement is yet another trend worth watching.  Comscore is on it: they just bought Shareablee, which uses a proprietary taxonomy to classify videos, images, and articles across major social media platforms.  Comscore will integrate Shareablee’s social audience insights with its existing media measurement tools.

It’s acquisitions all the way down today, Dear Reader.  GumGum, which applies computer vision and natural language processing to analyze online content for contextual ad targeting, has purchased Australia-based Playground xyz, which uses eye-tracking technology to measure how much time people spend looking at ads.  I guess there are still humans involved somewhere.