CDP Institute

A mere $4.5 million seed round isn’t big enough to interest LUMA, but it’s important to Driven Data, which offers automobile dealers “a hyper-personalized, open integration marketing platform that seamlessly integrates first-party data from multiple sources.”  Have we mentioned recently that industry-specialist CDPs are a trend?

Keeping a close watch on customer behavior is another trend, and Inbox Mailers adds its own wrinkle: it receives alerts when consumers are active in their mailbox and sends emails at once.  Consumers don’t know they’re being watched, so I guess it’s more clever than creepy.  Or is it?

Google may have delayed its arrival, but the cookieless ad train has left the station.   Ad sales platform Magnite is chugging along with its entry in the cookie replacement race, a consortium of publishers, advertisers and middlefolk that will use publishers’ first-party data to assign consumers to standardized segments and target ads accordingly, without tracking individuals.  More than thirty companies have joined and Magnite has donated the program to the industry-run Prebid.org group.

“VIOOH’s OOH supply can now be accessed through the Sonata omnichannel DSP by Taptap” crows this press release.  Depending on who you are, that either needs no explanation or makes no sense.  For the uninitiated, the news here is the growing application of digital ad techniques to billboards, signs, and other outdoor advertising.

Since we’re wallowing deep in adtech geekery today, let’s finish with news that IAB Tech Lab has released an automated service that helps to reduce ad fraud by comparing the ads.txt or app-ads.txt files of authorized ad sellers for a given site with the sellers.json files that let publishers check that they’re accurate.  Esoteric but important.

Tealium is making it easier for clients to insert custom Javascript operations within their processing flows.  The new feature, called Functions, gives users a canvas to hold Javascript code that accesses Tealium connectors and data.   The initial version will move data and access destination APIs; later versions will add data transformations within Tealium itself.

Catalina and Verizon Media are matching their identity graphs, making it possible for marketers to advertise to Verizon audiences and then see Catalina’s data on what audience members actually buy at retail.  Verizon Media has data on 148 million people while Catalina tracks 103 million U.S. households.  It’s all cookie-free.

Shopify is reducing the share of revenue it takes from app developers on its marketplace.  The move follows similar reductions by Apple, Google, and Amazon, who are all under anti-trust pressure that takes high app marketplace fees are prime evidence of monopoly positions.  Shopify’s particular change is to cut it’s current 20% fee to zero for developers who earn less than $1 million per year on its App Store and Theme Store.

It’s kindof a big deal, but you’ve probably already heard that a federal judge has delayed, and perhaps killed, the big federal and state anti-trust suit against Facebook.  So I’ll report instead that Sprout Social is doing its bit to advance the cause of social commerce by integrating with Shopify and Facebook Shops. Sprout Social users will have easy access to customers’ purchase history while interacting with them through social channels.

Unified commerce platform Kibo also has new integrations, although they’re with the Monetate and Certona personalization systems that Kibo already owns. The spawn includes personalized site search, personalized category pages, and predictive visual search. By happy coincidence, I also have this Lucidworks study showing that 78% of shoppers interact with product recommends and 62% often make unplanned purchases based on them.

Here’s an intriguing announcement from digital audio adtech vendor AdsWizz, offering an attribution system that connects audio ads with purchases in other channels.  They embed a tracking pixel in websites to capture consumer behaviors and somehow connect the “digital breadcrumbs” to figure out which behaviors are the result of the audio campaigns.  Exactly how they do this, they do not say.

Zeta Global and Dun & Bradstreet are combining their data to enable business marketers to target business contacts based on consumer data including purchase intent, behaviors, transactions, and location.   Audiences combining D&B business information with Zeta Global consumer data will be sold by both companies, with a special focus on giving small businesses easy access to advanced marketing capabilities.