CDP Institute

Cloud communications vendor Sinch has expanded into email with the purchase of Pathwire, which owns email delivery companies Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid.  Price was $925 million in cash and $1 billion in Sinch stock, or about 14x Pathwire’s $132 million revenue.  The deal is Sinch’s fourth acquisition this year, including messaging platforms MessageMedia ($1.3 billion) and MessengerPeople ($55 million) and voice interconnection provider Inteliquent ($1.9 billion).

Not every deal is consummated.  Zoom announced that it will not complete its planned purchase of cloud contact center company Five9 after Five9’s shareholders rejected the all-stock offer.  The value was $14.7 billion when the agreement was announced in July, but Zoom’s stock price is now about 30% lower.

App store revenue streams keep springing new leaks. The latest is at Google Cloud marketplace, which will reportedly cut its revenue share from 20% to 3%. The Cloud marketplace is separate from the Play Store for android apps, which already reduced its revenue share in July, following a similar cut by Apple. Microsoft cut the Windows app store share of game purchase revenue in August, and just announced its app store will now allow third party storefronts.

The beleaguered walled garden vendors also face new competition for ad revenue, most notably from TikTok, which just passed one billion users. TikTok is moving quickly to help ad buyers come aboard, with a bucket of new features to connect brands with content creators, to create content and ads, and to measure results. They’ve also added partnerships with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify for ad safety and fraud protection.

Retail is another battle front for BigTech. Walmart has been leading the charge but grocery chain Albertsons is now stepping to the fore. In a  flurry of moves, they’ve recently partnered with Pinterest to help shoppers plan meals, added shoppable livestream video from Firework, and teamed with DoorDash to let shoppers add restaurant orders to their grocery deliveries at no extra charge.

International Sloth Day – the traditional day for CDP product announcements – is several weeks away, but some vendors couldn’t wait. Amperity yesterday launched Amperity 4.0, which features real-time event streaming, self-optimizing predictive models, new connectors, more precise data access control, faster queries, and more.

CDP Blueshift also jumped the gun by announcing an extension of its journey orchestration to support all channels including commerce, sales, loyalty, and support.  The vendor has also added a new App Hub with 80+ integrations including direct mail, support, CRM, IVR, paid media, and other partners.

Switching to ad measurement: NielsenIQ has purchased omnichannel analytics vendor Data Impact and e-commerce purchase panel builder Rakuten Intelligence.  The deals will extend NielsenIQ’s own retail sales data to provide a more complete view ecommerce results. Separately, Accretive Media has launched an automated out-of-home ad measurement product that combines data on screen locations, consumer households, online and offline sales, foot traffic, website visits, and app downloads. Also: LoopMe has introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement, which uses surveys to measure brand lift across all digital channels in real time.

There’s nothing like a hefty CDP funding round to start the week.  We have that today courtesy of Optimove, which announced $75 million raise, bringing its total to $95 million.

In classic lemonade-from-lemons style, Google is adapting to the loss of cookies by switching Google Ads’ default conversion reporting away from click-based methods to machine learning-based attribution models.  The company swears its technique drives lower cost-per-acquisition, and it probably does.  But it also requires you to trust that they’ll honestly report results since there’s no way to check their work.

Data observability platform Bigeye has raised a $45 million Series B, bringing its total to $66 million.  I know you probably don’t care, Dear Reader, but am reporting it anyway because it’s important to recognize the booming growth of data management tools that help IT departments construct their own customer data management systems.

This Harris Poll study for Redpoint Global offers a sobering view of customer experience reality.  They found that marketers are twice as likely as consumers to think brands deliver an excellent experience (51% vs 26%), while under half of the marketers who use advanced technologies including personalization, AI-driven recommendations, or multi-variate testing think they are having great success with them.  Fun fact: the average number of customer engagement systems is now 16, nearly double the figure in 2019.