CDP Institute

Customer support is emerging as a primary use case for artificial intelligence, sometimes to replace human agents but more often to help them.  Zendesk just bought AI startup Cleverly for that application.  We also just saw Level AI launch its own AI-based conversational support app with $15 million in funding. Next door in the customer success department, involve.ai just raised a $16 million Series A for AI to predict customer churn.

Walmart has opened two more fronts in its siege of Amazon’s walled garden. They announced a program to provide home delivery for other retailers, leveraging the infrastructure they developed for their own use. The deal adds scale economies and strengthens Amazon competitors. Walmart also teamed with The Trade Desk to provide a demand side platform (DSP) that makes it easier to target ads at Walmart customers via in-store, Walmart digital properties, and third party publishers. One big advantage: advertisers can look at Walmart sales to measure ad results.

At the start of 2021, brands, publishers, and ad agencies were all about equally worried about losing third-party cookies.  That changed in a follow-up survey, which found that publishers and agencies are less worried than before while brands’ concern has grown.    An optimist might think agencies and publishers have developed plans that brand marketers don’t understand yet.  A cynic might suspect agencies and publishers have realized they’ll make money no matter what.

Plenty of companies are eager to help marketers replace cookie data.  Big 3 credit bureau TransUnion has joined the crowd with TruAudience, a trio of products that include identity resolution, advertising audiences based on third party data, and look-alike audiences based on a client’s own customers.  TransUnion says the services don’t use any protected financial data.

Data compiler Neustar is also working to fill consumer data gaps.  They’ve just added 62 million survey-based consumer profiles from Dynata to their Second-Party Data Marketplace.  The profiles will help Neustar enrich clients’ existing customer profiles and create new segments to target.

CDP vendor Lytics has announced the open beta of a new tool, Cloud Connect, that will let the Lytics personalization engine run SQL queries to extract data from cloud data warehouses such as Google Cloud Platform and Snowflake.  The results will be merged with real-time data streams within the personalization engine, formerly the Lytics CDP but now called Lytics Decision Engine.   Note that there’s still a unified, persistent customer database in the picture.

CDP Blueshift is expanding sales efforts in the European and Asia Pacific regions, announcing plans to open London and Singapore offices and an option to host data in Europe.  The company raised a $30 million Series C in February and is eager to grow its global footprint.

I know you love Gartner reports, Dear Reader, so here’s a fairly modest one about the role of marketing in digital transformation.  The most interesting news is that 80% of CMOs leaders think they’re responsible for leading digital business transformation strategies, a figure that most non-marketing leaders would probably find delusional.   More realistically, 83% say that innovation programs have not met management expectations.

Does the term “no-code” set your heart aflutter?  If so, be sure to sit down before reading that no-code data visualization and dashboarding platform Preset has raised a $35.9 million Series B, bringing total funding to $48.4 million.  Less evolved users can still write SQL queries if they wish.  Preset is a managed service on top of Apache Superset, which some readers will find even more exciting than no-code.

Since we’ve already started down the data geek rabbit hole, here’s news that data quality vendor Monte Carlo has raised a $60 million Series C, bringing their total to $101 million.  Monte Carlo’s super power is making it easier for data engineers and analysts to monitor the quality of data as it moves through company pipelines.  That’s called “data observability” and quite a few companies do it.

I wish I had one more data story but we’ll have to settle for learning that out of home ad marketplace AdQuick has partnered with Catalina to target and measure OOH ads based on Catalina’s individual-level purchase data.  It’s a major step beyond the usual OOH measurements based on broad demographics and foot traffic.  While targeting will be based on historic information, the purchase information will be updated in real time.

B2B has been a growing market for CDP vendors, apparently for longer than we realized: this MeritB2B study finds that almost 40% of respondents have a CDP in place already and another 12% plan to buy one.  In fact, centralized customer data was vastly more common than predictive analytics, lead scoring, programmatic advertising, or intent data.  Who knew?