CDP Institute

The lines between online and in-store shopping are blurring. Retail shopping and payment platform Klarna just bought Hero, which connects online shoppers with retailer staff via text, chat, and video. This Snapchat survey agrees that shoppers want to mix digital and real world experiences: 35% said they’d go out of their way to shop at a store with interactive virtual services such as a smart mirror that lets them try on clothes or makeup.  Over 40% use their phone in-store to compare prices and look for product information.

Want more about retail and social? This BrandTotal survey finds that over 80% of respondents have purchased a product or service as a result of a social ad.  Sprout Social reports that consumers rank “strong customer service” as the most important factor in a best-of-class social experience.  Marketers ranked it sixth in a parallel survey.  Download to see which industries are most responsive to social help requests.

Marketing automation vendor Sailthru has announced an integration with the Twilio Segment CDP.  The integration will unify the email, mobile app, and website data created by Sailthru components, in addition to data from other sources.  What may be most interesting is that Sailthru chose to work with Segment, whose parent Twilio competes with Sailthru, rather than buy a CDP of its own.

Namogoo calls itself a Digital Journey Continuity Platform, a term with more syllables than I have fingers.  In plainer English, it makes personalized website offers based on customer intent.  They just bought Remarkety, which sends emails and text messages also based on intent.  It’s a good fit.

Namogoo’s original business was blocking unauthorized ads on ecommerce Web sites, one small corner of the ad fraud universe.  After years of growth, that universe is finally shrinking, according to this report from DoubleVerify.  Wide adoption of preventative measures has resulted in lower fraud rates, higher viewability, and fewer brand safety violations.  APAC and Latin America have shown particular improvements.  Download for country-by-country detail.

Dentsu Group is expanding the commerce capabilities of its Merkle unit by purchasing customer service and commerce agency LiveArea.  LiveArea was the consulting arm of PFSweb, which will continue to offer fulfillment services.  PFSweb reported the price at $250 million, roughly three times LiveArea revenues of $85 million.

Adtech developer The Trade Desk has launched a new trading platform aimed at dealing with the post-cookie ad world. The new platform includes onboarding for advertisers’ first-party data, support for non-cookie IDs such as Unified ID 2.0, support for addressable TV ads, and a measurement marketplace to incorporate data from retailers and other offsite sources. The Trade Desk also announced a new venture capital arm to invest in other adtech firms.

Fast-growing event management platform Hopin is buying Attendify, which provides an “attendee data platform” to support CRM and marketing functions including email campaigns.  It’s (at least) the fifth acquisition Hopin has made this year.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other big tech players are pushing back against Hong Kong’s new data protection law, asking for clarifications in rules that could criminalize publishing personal data.  A June 25 letter from the Asia Internet Coalition said the companies might “refrain from investing and offering their services in Hong Kong” but later discussions made clear this is unlikely.

Speaking of escape from oppressive regimes, e-commerce vendor Shogun has raised $67.5 million to help companies create alternatives to selling their products through Amazon and other marketplaces.   Shogun offers tools to build ecommerce storefronts that connect with platforms including Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce – putting the head in headless, as it were.   Shogun has now raised $114.5 million total.

Connected TVs are another escape path from the walled gardens and (some) privacy constraints.  TV maker VIZIO has just certified several vendors for meeting the Open Addressable Ready (OAR) specifications for TV ad targeting.  VIZIO can serve ads on more than 11 million addressable TVs in the U.S.   OAR members include AMC Networks, Comcast NBCUniversal, Discovery Networks, Disney, EW Scripps, Fox, Hearst Television, Univision, ViacomCBS, VIZIO and WarnerMedia.

LeanData, which offers B2B lead routing and lead-to-account matching services, has added an integration with ZoomInfo.  The new arrangement will make it easier to add ZoomInfo data to records as they’re being processed by LeanData.  It all happens within the Salesforce CRM system.