CDP Institute

Here’s a little bundle of ad measurement news, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We won’t judge.) Omnicom Media Group is organizing an industry-wide initiative to set standards for connected TV (CTV) ad inventory, identity and fraud protection practices. The Association of National Advertisers plans to test a cross-media measurement system from VideoAmp.  And mobile marketing analytics vendor Adjust can now relate app conversions and post-install events to CTV ad campaigns.

Look, this whole “retail media” thing is intriguing, and so is live-stream social shopping.  But does the world really need to combine them as Pinterest TV?  Well, it’s now a thing.

Organizational readiness is the most-cited problem (23%) among companies that have deployed a CDP, according to the CDP Institute’s latest member survey.  By contrast, failure of the CDP software to perform as promised was the least cited at 6%.  Download for fascinating detail and our traditionally woeful graphic design.

Watching the industry get ready for the post-cookie, privacy-enhanced future has the macabre fascination of a slow-motion train wreck.  This Lotame report finds fewer than 20% feel a high level of urgency to put in place post-cookie solutions and a minority of 42% say they are actively testing solutions.  This despite the fact that most marketers and publishers expect a loss of revenue and jobs when cookies go away.  La la la.

Enough with the surveys.  Master data management vendor Reltio just raised a $120 million Series E, bringing total funding to $237 million.  Reltio qualifies as a CDP but handles lots of non-customer data, so the MDM label is a better fit.

It’s B2B all the way today, Dear Reader. Dun & Bradstreet just bought B2B data compiler NetWise and tougher-to-describe Eyeota, which offers audience data collection, identification, and activation. Like the Zeta Global partnership announced in June, the deals give D&B a larger presence in the consumer data universe.

Meanwhile, Demandbase just announced it will help expand the B2B capabilities of Microsoft’s CDP, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Microsoft clients will be able to read data from Demandbase, InsideView, and DemandMatrix (all owned by Demandbase) and execute campaigns through Demandbase delivery tools. Unless you have the memory of a gnat, you’ll recall that Microsoft just announced its CDP will join other Microsoft products in a Customer Experience Platform.

Finally, funding. Apollo.io just raised a $32 million Series B for its prospecting data system, which has collected 220 million business contacts by scanning the web and collecting data from freemium clients.   And Merge announced a $15 million Series A for its B2B data integration platform. Merge handles all types of data, not just customer information.

Treasure Data has secured $234 million in funding, mostly from parent company Softbank.  So far as we know, it’s the largest CDP round ever.  You may recall that Treasure Data was purchased by Softbank-owned Arm in 2016 and became independent again earlier this year, with Softbank retaining a major ownership position.

Microsoft has announced its Customer Experience Platform, which includes a collection of existing Microsoft products including their CDP, the catchily-named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.   Other components offer data governance, machine learning, website analytics, journey orchestration, ad campaigns, ecommerce, sales and service.  It’s not clear what’s actually new here, although there may be more prebuilt integrations than before.

Medallia is a customer experience platform in the narrower sense of capturing customer feedback via surveys. They now include a wide range of data capture, unification, analysis, and interaction capabilities, which they just packaged as Medallia Digital Suite. If a combining customer feedback and behavioral data sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Zendesk bought SurveyMonkey parent Momentive just last week to do just that.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The Boss said his arm was too sore to write today, which seems weird but lets me share this Airtable study which found that most marketers are overworked, half spend at least 30% of their time on manual tasks, and 60% of teams use more than twenty tools on a regular basis. Incidentally, Kintone disagrees: they say the average office worker actually uses 35 apps and switches among them at least 1,100 times each day.