CDP Institute

One thing that’s perfectly clear is Zoom’s growth during the pandemic. They’re looking to build on their success by adding a virtual events platform, which will offer ticketing, registration, networking, and suchlike. They also published an interesting, if predictable, study that found video communications and hybrid events are here to stay.

In case you actually read this newsletter for CDP-related news, we’ll share Algonomy’s latest update.  They’ve added a bunch of new ecommerce connectors, improved controls over data access, program-level control groups, and enhancements for merchandising and product recommendations.

Low-code and no-code system development are often lumped together but this Creatio study highlights that they’re quite different.  Actually, it just covers low-code, finding that just 6% of low-code development is done by business users without any IT involvement.  It’s a safe bet that many more no-code developers are working outside of IT.

Marketing measurement expert Kochava has purchased identity graph builder DigiCenter.  The deal will expand the Kochava Collective mobile data marketplace with richer data and added email and cross-device identity coverage.  The combined business will have data on more than 1 billion hashed emails and 9 billion devices.

Here are two more bits of identity-related news. Verticast’s Valassis has launched Household Connect, which groups devices into households based on their behaviors and ties them to a physical address. And TVSquared has integrated Foursquare location data to tie TV ads to store visits and foot traffic. Household Connect will enable better ad targeting while the TVSquared enhancement will improve campaign measurement.

Klaviyo rather slyly describes itself as a “customer data and marketing automation platform”, which may or not mean they claim to be a CDP.  They do build unified profiles with data from ecommerce systems and web sites but it’s not clear they support all the inputs required by a CDP or make the resulting profiles easily available.  What is clear is they’ve just raised a $320 million Series D at a $9.15 billion-with-a-b valuation, and have doubled their customer count to over 70,000 in the past year.

Piano is another company that doesn’t call itself a CDP but still builds unified customer profiles.  Their focus is supporting subscription businesses with features ranging from subscription sales to personalized experience creation to recommendations to audience segmentation.  They just raised a $20 million Series C plus $68 million in debt, on top of a previous $28 million.

Explorium clearly isn’t a CDP but it also gathers data in its own way. Specifically, it analyzes predictive models and searches its library for external data sources that could help the models work better. They just raised a $75 million Series C. They also released an interesting survey on external data acquisition: 62% use external demographics data and 51% collect anonymized individual data.

Cloud-based communications platform Twilio is buying toll-free messaging platform Zipwhip to expand its multi-channel message delivery capabilities.  Price is $850 million in cash and stock.  Growth of multi-channel cloud platforms is one of the trends we’ve been watching.  You’ll recall that Twilio bought the Segment CDP last year for $3.2 billion.

AT&T is spinning off its WarnerMedia unit and combining it with Discovery, Inc. to create an even larger media business.  AT&T shareholders will own 71% of the combined business while Discovery shareholders own 29%.  This matters to you, Dear Reader, because the new entity will collect even more customer data than before.

To further clarify how valuable that streaming TV data is, we have this report that TV maker Vizio is making nearly as much money from its advertising and data business as it is from selling hardware: $38.4 million for data and ads vs $48.2 million for hardware in the first quarter of 2021, with the data and ad portion growing much more quickly.  The value comes from the comprehensive customer data Vizio’s smart TVs can collect.

Google has clearly reached the acceptance stage in its mourning for the death of cookies.  They recently summarized plans for post-cookie ad tracking, including: consent mode, which adjusts data capture based on user consents; conversion modeling, which uses predictive analytics to estimate conversions on non-tracked consumers; and conversion measurement, which anonymously tracks individuals’ ad response over time and across devices and reports on aggregated results.