CDP Institute

Call analytics is small niche where Invoca is one of the big frogs. It just got bigger by gobbling up DialogTech, which does more or less the same thing but targets smaller clients. Invoca’s funding to date is $118 million, which makes the reported $100 million price for DialogTech a big gulp.

Analytics systems like Contentsquare and Invoca rely heavily on artificial intelligence. But this FICO report paints a disturbing picture about AI governance: it finds just 20% of companies actively monitor their AI models for fairness and ethics, and 68% of respondents say their company’s processes to ensure AI complies with regulations are ineffective. Almost as many, 65%, say their AI systems can’t explain how decisions are made.

LiveRamp, whose main business has been matching clients’ data against its own identity graph, is now helping clients match their own data against itself.  Portrait Engine, now in beta, lets clients use LiveRamp’s matching technology to build custom ID graphs.  They can build different graphs for different purposes and still match their data against third party information from LiveRamp and others.

D4t4 Solutions’ Celebrus CDP is offering its own system for matching first-party identifiers and assembling customer profiles based on the results.  It runs in real-time and takes advantage of Celebrus’ core technology, which collects detailed behavioral data without conventional Web site tags.  If you’re wondering about the name “D4t4”, it looks like “Data” if you print it in the right font and have had a pint or two.

Many companies don’t have enough data of their own to build an effective identity graph or complete profiles.  Stirista fills the gaps with third party data, both by enhancing existing customer records and adding new contacts.  Stirista just launched Access B2B, a new division focused on B2B clients.  In addition to data, Stirista provides email and advertising campaigns.

Few marketers doubt that personalization works but it’s still nice to see some proof.  This study by personalization vendor Aki offers proper test vs control comparisons, although they only created a handful of segments and showed the same “personalized” ad to everyone in each segment.  It does show the segment-specific messages beat generic messages and offers some details which groups are most responsive.

This IAS study relied on consumer surveys rather than behaviors, so it’s not as reliable as a real test.  But you’ll still probably like the answers: 77% of Twitter users said they’re comfortable sharing data with Twitter for a better ad experience; 59% said they’re remember an in-feed ad if it was relevant to surrounding content; and 54% said they’re comfortable engaging with ads that appear next to “personal content”, whatever that means.

Switching back to hard data: Nielsen identified more than 1,200 website URLs containing anti-Asian hate speech and found more than 250 ad campaigns that ran on them, with a spend of $153 million in the first quarter of this year alone.  The list includes a dozen Fortune 500 companies who were effectively funding hate speech but Nielsen pulls its punch by not naming them.

Is there any topic nearer to your heart than data integration, Dear Reader?  Oh, sorry to hear that.  But let’s talk about it today anyway.  We’ll start with news that purchase data collector IRI has launched a suite of tools that let clients combine their own data with IRI data and analytics for audience identification, pricing, and demand prediction.  They don’t use the term “clean room” but that seems to be what’s involved.

InfoSum is a data clean room provider first and foremost.  They’ve just announced a deal to integrate their technology with Omnicom Group’s Omni marketing orchestration and analytics platform.  This will let Omnicom clients to combine their own first party data with data from Omnicom and other sources, without actually sharing the data itself.

Finally, some funding news. Syncari has raised a $17.3 million Series A for its no-code data automation platform, whose superpower is to transform data from different systems into a common structure, so it can be easily shared. And Merge has raised a $4.5 million seed round for its API that lets B2B companies extract data from human resources, payroll, and accounting platforms. Neither system stores the data outside the original sources, so we’re clearly outside CDP territory.

The final fruit of Apple’s new tracking opt-in rules is unknown, but one immediate result is a bumper crop of articles estimating the opt-in rate. Flurry gained attention with an early report that just 4% of U.S. users were opting in, accompanied by other calculations that now run as high as a 24% global rate. AppsFlyer presented figures ranging from 31% to 40% with useful breakdowns by app type.  Branch tweeted some hard-to-parse stats that seem to show about 12% of apps have been granted tracking permission. The Post-IDFA Alliance... Read More >