CDP Institute

This PwC Global Entertainment & Media Outlook report lists OOH as one of the fastest growing ad channels, along with tons of other data on advertising segments, projected growth, and trends.  Like other analysts, they’re projecting a strong recovery for advertising after last year’s unprecedented contractions.  Lots here for free although you’d have to pay $3,300 for full access.

I have a special fondness for headless technologies, mostly because they remind me of the famous New York Post headline.  So I’m tickled to share that headless commerce platform Fabric has raised a $100 million Series B, just five months after a $43 million Series A.  This thing has legs.

Despite more hand-wringing than bell-playing octopus quartet, Ad Theorent reports that just 13% of marketers say their company is “very well prepared” for the impact of privacy regulations on their programmatic ad buying.  The most popular solutions are capturing more first-party data (53%) and contextual targeting (49%) – even though only 5% say contextual targeting leads to success.  If you’re keeping score: 11% are running programmatic on a CDP, compared with 18% on a DMP and 69% on a DSP.

Speaking of programmatic, this study from Xaxis and Catalyst finds that more than half of marketers are using programmatic buys for non-traditional channels including audio (59%), Out of Home (57%) and in-game advertising (56%).  Measurement is the biggest obstacle to using new channels while siloed organizations and disconnected technology are tied as the top barriers to integrated advertising and marketing techniques.

RedPoint Global has launched an in-place data quality service, In Situ, which will let clients clean, match, and govern their data without sending it to an outside service.  The trick is to run the system within the client’s virtual private cloud.  A control panel lets business users do most of the work for themselves.

Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.

One billion dollars is pocket change at Facebook, which just pledged that amount to content creators in an eye-catching headline.  But the reality is less impressive: the money is spread across two years and among several convoluted Facebook and Instagram programs.  TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube already have similar programs involving hundreds of millions of dollars, so if Facebook hopes to buy its way to dominance, they’ll have to try harder.

Zoom has announced a deal to buy cloud contact center company Five9 for $14.7 billion (with a B) in stock.  The price is an astronomical 34x Five9’s $425 million revenue and nearly 5x Zoom’s own revenue.  Zoom sees the deal as giving it a firmer foothold in the enterprise communications market, although Five9 is far from the market leader.

The build vs buy debate isn’t over.  More than half of companies are either entirely (16%) or partly (38.5%) building their own “customer/marketing data platform”, according to this survey of UK and EU CMOs by Martech Alliance for Treasure Data.  Fewer were stitching together best-of-breed vendor solutions (32.5%) and just 10.5% were relying on a single vendor’s integrated marketing suite.  Perhaps related: just 20% have fully connected customer profiles and 48% say their company fails to meet customer expectations for a unified experience.

Xtremepush started as a messaging system but is now one of the companies hoping to sell you a unified digital engagement platform.  Yes, it includes a CDP.  They just raised $33 million to double their workforce and accelerate their global expansion.

Publicis Groupe has purchased CitrusAd, a platform that places ads on ecommerce websites, in physical stores, and in email.  It will be a standalone business within Publicis’ Epsilon group.  If this sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Dentsu bought ecommerce agency LiveArea for its Merkle unit just two weeks ago.

It’s been a Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory week with more news than I can handle.  We have two items from ZoomInfo alone: a direct integration to make their data available within Microsoft Dynamics 365, and a $575 million purchase of Chorus.ai, an AI-driven conversation analysis and sales coaching tool.