CDP Institute

Crowdsourced business data has a mixed reputation, but apparently Lusha is making it work: the company just raised a $205 million Series B, following a $40 million Series A in February.  The system recommends relevant contacts from its base of 100 million business contacts and has direct integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, and other common tools.

Lily AI calls itself the “industry’s first customer intent platform for ecommerce”, which is the sort of claim that raises the question of what – if anything – is really new.  The answer seems to be it analyzes product images to extract ten times more attributes than other systems get from text descriptions, correlates those attributes with customer behavior to infer intent, and uses the product to deliver highly targeted search results and recommendations.  The company just officially launched but already has testimonials from major retailers.

Audigent, which enables ad targeting based on publisher’s first party customer data, has linked its audiences with TransUnion’s TruAudience Data Marketplace.  The deal will let advertisers filter publisher audiences against more than 300 audience segments assembled by TransUnion.  TransUnion says it has “insight” into 98% of U.S. adults and more than 127 million homes.

Digital media measurement vendor DoubleVerify has agreed to pay $150 million for OpenSlate, which rates social media content for brand safety, suitability and subject matter.  OpenSlate helps advertisers decide where to run their campaigns, while DoubleVerify reports on content seen after campaigns have run.  Nice.

I’m not sure that “data reliability” is a distinct software category from, say, data pipelines, data quality, and data observability. Still, Monte Carlo used it a year ago and now there’s Datafold, which checks the impact of system changes on data quality before rather than after they go into production.  They just raised a $20 million Series A.  Related: Anomalo recently raised $33 million for automated data quality analysist and Cascade Labs raised $5.3 million for no-code data workflows.

Marchex, which uses AI to analyze telephone conversations as they happen, has added a new integration hub to give other systems access to its technology.  Platform integrations are now available for Twilio, RingCentral, Five9, Telnyx, and Amazon S3.  The company also supports data integrations with systems including Salesforce Sales Cloud, Google Marketing Platform, and Adobe Experience Cloud.

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.