CDP Institute

Newly reborn Yahoo, which emerged Alien-like from the belly of Verizon, has announced new partnerships for its ConnectID cookieless identity solution.  Additions include media measurement companies IRI and NCSolutions and CDP mParticle, which will push segments to the Yahoo DSP.  Records will be matched against the ConnectID identity graph of 148 million logged-in users, 240 million unique profiles, and over 400 million unique devices.

Retail messaging platform Wunderkind has integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder.  The relationship will give Salesforce users more precise control over triggered Web and email messages.  Wunderkind’s super powers come in part from its purchase of CDP SmarterHQ last November.

Researchers MarketsandMarkets have issued their latest CDP industry report, which puts 2021 revenue at $3.5 billion and projects growth to $15.3 billion by 2026, a 34.6% annual increase.  They include professional services in addition to software and SaaS revenues, their list of CDPs is a bit odd, and I have doubts about their methodology.  Still, if you have a spare $5,650, some of their observations seem reasonable.

Privacy-focused CDP Zeotap has raised $11 million in a second extension to its July 2020 Series C, which now totals $71 million.  Like other vendors, Zeotap is taking advantage of a favorable fund-raising environment.  Total funding is now $90 million.

Acquia has agreed to purchase Widen, which offers cloud-native digital asset management and product information management software.  The deal extends Acquia’s digital experience platform beyond web content management, which is largely text-focused.   As you surely know, Acquia has a marketing cloud that includes the former Agilone CDP.

Ascend2 took a look at the state of marketing automation and found that just 20% of respondents feel they are using their system to its full potential.  Lack of training (39%), resources (32%) and budget (31%) were the most cited obstacles, ranking well ahead of poor integration (16%), missing features (14%) and decentralized data (14%).  This doesn’t mean integration is a solved problem: just 7% of respondents said their marketing automation is fully integrated with other systems and 29% said it’s mostly integrated.

This Third Door Media / MarTech survey found 67% of organizations replaced at least one marketing tool in the past year, with marketing automation (24%), email distribution (23%) and CRM (23%) at the top of the list.  Interesting, but there’s no baseline of how many had each type of system in the first place.  Just over half said getting better features was the main reason for replacement – far outpacing cost.  About 30% of the replacement systems were home grown.  Download for more on decision time, upgrade champions, Covid impact,... Read More >

This just in from Lake Wobegon: two-thirds (68%) of respondents to this Lucidpress survey said they’re confident that most of their company’s content is relevant, even though only 32% find other companies are sending relevant content to them. Possibly related: 27% consistently measure the ROI of the content they create. Just 32% say more than half their content is personalized.

Headless commerce makes it easier to deploy custom ecommerce front-ends by providing the underlying processing technology. It’s an important trend but there’s too much happening to cover in depth.  So here are some headlines to give you a flavor: Shopistry has integrated with the Square payments platform and joined its App Marketplace.  Fast Simon has expanded its Shopify integration with  a new shopping optimization tools.  OneView Commerce has made its transaction engine available on Microsoft Azure.   You get the idea.

Conversational analytics is another growing space. The latest news there is that contact center AI vendor Observe.AI bought ScopeAI, which automatically extracts insights from chat, email, and social conversations.  Related items we’ve already reported include: ZenDesk’s purchase of Cleverly, Level AI’s launch with $15 million funding, Involve.AI’s $16 million Series A, and Verint’s purchase of Conversocial.

Messaging platforms are also hot, although I have just one item today: Netherlands-based Trengo has raised a $36 million Series A. Trengo combines customer and employee communications across multiple messaging channels, so it also plays in the equally-hot collaboration platform space.

Let’s do surveys today, Dear Reader.  Adobe offers a plethora of fun facts.  Sixty percent of personalization use cases rely on third-party cookies but just 37% of marketers feel ready for the cookieless future.  More consumers would share data in exchange for seeing no ads (55%) than for personalized experiences (53%) or free online services (39%).  Just 37% of marketers have real-time access to a central customer record.   Even more fun: only 28% with a central customer record said their CDP could read it, suggesting central customer data often sits... Read More >