CDP Institute

Worried about cookieless ad targeting?   Ad buying vendor Centro  has hooked up with semantic content analysis specialist Peer39 to offer a new contextual category recommendation system.   And Captify, which mines searches on publisher and ecommerce websites to build target audiences, just sold a majority stake to privacy equity firm SFW Capital.

Looking for automated personalization?  LimeStory, whose “micro storytelling workflow” apparently creates personalized content sequences (their website is ironically unclear), is entering the North American market with a focus on higher education institutions.  Jivox has enhanced its ability to create “thousands of personalized video variations” with a simplified user interface, connectors to household and contextual data, and automated conversion of outputs into different formats.  And Intellimize has raised a $30 million Series B  for dynamic web pages that create optimized B2B conversion funnels for each visitor.

I think of Twilio as “the company that sells Segment CDP and some other stuff”, but some people have a different perspective.  Those folks may be excited about the beta release of Twilio Live, an interactive live streaming feature that lets companies create their own versions of TikTok, Clubhouse, and Peleton sessions.

Netcore Cloud is another company that I think of as a CDP, although their primary business has been personalized email, more lately expanded to omnichannel marketing automation.  They’re not well known in the U.S. despite serving 5,000 brands in 22 countries.  They hope to change that, having just announced entry to the U.S. market.

Kitewheel is also a name you might not recognize, but, trust me, they’ve been doing sophisticated customer journey orchestration since forever.  They were just bought by customer engagement vendor CSG, which got to know Kitewheel through several joint deployments.

Lots of CDP news today, Dear Reader.  Let’s start with a $100 million Series D announcement from Amperity.  The deal brings their total funding to $187 million and values the company at over $1 billion.

Next up: Treasure Data has completed its previously-announced separation from Softbank-owned Arm, which purchased it in 2018.  Treasure Data will now be in the Softbank Vision Fund 2 portfolio, gaining more independence and easier access to capital.  Treasure Data founding leaders Kazuki Ota, Hironobu Yoshikawa and Dan Weirich are also rejoining the company.

Acquia, whose CDP is based on its 2019 Agilone acquisition, has announced several product enhancements.  These include a unified user interface among its Marketing Cloud components, which include the CDP; streamline campaign management; and a unified machine learning dashboard.  Acquia also announced improvements to its Drupal cloud and expanded managed services within China.

Has the pandemic led companies to prioritize customer experience technology over traditional concerns for security and cost reduction? This Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study for Apptio found that corporate managers ranked customer experience at the top of their list of strategic goals for tech spending. But don’t get too excited: an IDG survey of mostly IT managers found they (still) put cybersecurity, analytics, and business process management ahead of customer experience spending.

Greater focus on customer experience creates greater need for unified customer data, which leads IT managers to consider building their own customer data systems. This attracts data pipeline vendors like Airbyte, which just released an open-source data integration platform including a “connector development kit”. The company raised a $5 million seed round in March and $26 million Series A in May and says it’s on a “mission to commoditize all data integration”.

Few IT departments want to build their own adtech, which leaves the field open for companies like Vistar Media, a specialist in digital out of home programmatic ad buying, selling, and network management. They just raised a $30 million Series B. Funds came from outdoor ad seller Lamar Advertising, which will gain a minority stake in Vistar.

Maybe you’re tired of hearing about Unified ID 2.0 and maybe you’re not.  If you do care, you’re probably interested in this Digiday report that Omnicom Media Group has formally endorsed it as “the post-cookie solution best suited for its clients and publisher partners”.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have made an actual announcement, so we’ll have to hope that Digiday’s story is correct.