CDP Institute

Forrester sees a different contradiction: it finds that companies are more worried about complying with privacy rules than cushioning their impact on marketing results.  Responses came from a mix of marketing, analytics, and privacy leaders, so it’s likely that marketers alone would set different priorities.   The study found measurable friction between the groups.

Companies that really care about privacy will also worry about how their partners treat customer data.  Consent management vendor Sourcepoint has launched Privacy Lens, an automated service that scans publisher Web sites to check their privacy practices.  Advertisers can then select only the publishers whose practices they find acceptable.  The system also tells publishers how much revenue they might gain if they improved a particular practice.

Text messages get more response than perhaps any other medium, mostly because people assume they are coming from other human beings.  Emotive is taking care of that, using artificial intelligence with human assistance to “replicate human interactions” to prevent cart abandonment, recommend products, and run promotions.  They just raised a $50 million Series B to do even more of it.

Having weathered the pandemic leaves CMOs more confident about their ability to meet future challenges, according to this study from fractional CMO service Chief Outsiders.   While 78.5% still see difficulty in staying ahead of technological advancements, that’s down from 88% one year ago.  In fact, 92% say companies are more prepared to strategically pivot and more say the pandemic has been an opportunity (43%) than a threat (39%).

This Twilio survey also sees more silver lining than cloud, reporting that companies plan to add an average of four new communications channel this year. Nearly all (91%) of respondents would rather build than buy new communications solutions. The report provides interesting regional breakdowns if you care for that sort of thing.

It’s funding all the way down today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with CDP Lexer, which just raised a $25.5 million Series B.  Lexer is unusual in providing an interface for customer service agents as well as traditional CDP data unification and sharing capabilities.

Next, ABM platform Terminus announced a $90 million Series C, bringing total funding to $120 million.  Terminus focuses on sales and marketing execution, but also includes a Data Studio that it calls “an embedded CDP”.

Lob – which is Bol spelled backwards – provides software and a print delivery network to streamline personalized direct mail production.  They just raised their own $50 million Series C, bringing total funding to $80 million (according to their Web site) or $121 million (says Crunchbase).  If they also claim to have a CDP, I missed it.

CDP Blueshift just raised a $30 million Series C, bringing total funding to $65 million.  The company calls itself a ‘SmartHub CDP’, indicating it provides AI-based analytics (“Smart”) and journey orchestration (“Hub”).  In CDP Institute terms that would be a “Campaign CDP” but we’ll admit that “SmartHub” sounds cooler.

CDP Exponea announced API-level integration with data quality and enrichment services from Acxiom.  The deal isn’t unique: Acxiom also lists integrations with Adobe, Boxever, Tealium, and Treasure Data.  But it’s still worth noting that tighter integration of CDPs and third party data vendors is becoming more common.  You may recall that Exponea was purchased last month by recommendation engine vendor Bloomreach.

Data analytics vendor Actian has released Customer 360 Solution, which it doesn’t call a CDP but still sounds like one.  The new solution loads data from disparate sources into Actian’s high-speed Avalanche database, generates insights, and shares the results with customer-facing systems.  The company says business users can set up the data connections without writing code.

It might be a sin to enjoy seeing Facebook attacked from all sides, but it’s worth it.  Having lost the battle against arbitration on news content payments to Australian publishers, the company now faces a joint push from Microsoft and major European publishers for similar rules.Meanwhile, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. legislators has proposed letting small publishers jointly negotiate news content payments without facing antitrust penalties.