CDP Institute

Marketing analytics platform Adverity has closed a $120 million Series D financing, bringing total funding to over $165 million.  Adverity collects data from 600+ advertising, retail, web analytics, social, CRM, email, and other sources; cleans and transforms it; sends the results to data stores and analysis tools; and does its own analysis to calculate marketing performance and recommend improvements.   It’s not quite a CDP but the line is blurry.

Sales enablement and content orchestration platform Seismic has raised a $170 million Series G and used some of the proceeds to purchase sales training platform Lessonly for an undisclosed amount.  It’s Seismic’s fifth acquisition in as many years.  Total funding is now $440 million and the company says it just passed a $200 million annual run rate.

Two-thirds of marketers believe that privacy changes will require changes in customer strategy, according to this Tapad poll.  Most are in survival mode, ranking privacy compliance and data quality as more important objectives than personalization, trust, or finding a universal ID.  That doesn’t mean ID resolution is easy: 82% report they’ve had at least one problem with it.

Data professionals polled by Immuta were even more concerned about privacy and security rules: 84% said they expected these would limit access to data in the next 24 months.  This makes a bad situation worse, since 55% say data is often stale today before it reaches end users.   A bit of caution if you expect self-service tools to ease the problem: 71% of data professionals and 78% of business leaders think data consumers are using freemium cloud tools but just 63% of the consumers say they are.

Managers do recognize the problem: 55% of data and analytics pros in this Dremio survey said their company has increased its data investments in the past two years, but just 22% of that group said they had achieved a full return on their investment. Meanwhile, this Harvard Business Review Analytic Service report for Profisee found that 60% of executives believe their company underinvests in data.  They see processes including data governance, master data management, and data auditing, as the most important solutions, not data warehouse or cloud technologies.

The News Gods have been mostly on vacation this week, but they did share that casino and events operator Bally’s Corporation is buying Telescope Inc., which builds real-time engagement solutions for live and online events.  The deal will bolster Bally’s interactive brands.  It’s an example of brands buying technology companies instead of just using their products.

While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor.  Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents.  Price was $50 million.

So many companies are offering post-cookie, cross-channel identity solutions that it’s not clear whether a new one really counts as news.  But Samba TV does have an interesting story, starting with data from sensors built into smart TVs and extending that through probabilistic matching to identify all devices in a household.   They just launched a proprietary identifier, SambaID, which will let advertisers buy and measure deduplicated household-level audiences across digital devices.

Martech stacks changed more in the past year than the three previous years combined, say 77% of marketers in this Sitecore survey.  But the silver lining has a cloud: 72% said most of the changes were short-term fixes that will have to be cleaned up in the future.  Oh, and most of that martech innovation was aimed at moving technology to the cloud, while customer loyalty, personalization, and integration got reduced attention.

Marketers in this Salesforce report also report lots of pandemic-driven changes.  But the longer-term trends are more interesting: a doubling in the number of B2C data sources from 2020 to 2022; increase in “dynamic cross-channel coordination” from 31% in 2018 to 68% in 2021; 70% say they have a CDP.  Especially intriguing: just 26% say privacy compliance is challenging, down from 32% last year.

I’m not sure what to make of this item: programmatic video platform Tremor Video says it has breached the walled gardens with a collection of 85 million U.S. consumer profiles that span multiple social platforms.  What seems to be going on is they use ICX Media profiles with segments derived from social media activity, such as posts, shares, and comments.  Delivery comes through connected TV and other video campaigns.  Vague but interesting.

Someone at Salesforce has taken the “every company is a publisher” cliché a bit too literally, resulting in Salesforce+, a new content streaming service that promises endless hours of Salesforce-related materials.  There will be no fewer than four channels featuring a slate of live experiences, on-demand videos, and – everyone’s favorite – the best of Marc Benioff’s Dreamforce keynotes.  Watch for plush costumes.