CDP Institute

We also have a $230 million Series F from Yotpo, which offers customer engagement modules for SMS messaging, loyalty and referrals, and user reviews, comments, and content. It’s an integrated platform but also connects with ecommerce platforms including Shopify, Magento, SAP, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. Total funding is now $406 million and the deal values the company at $1.4 billion, a hefty 14x their $100 million revenue.

Let’s follow some money today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a $300 million funding by Website builder Squarespace, which has grown to include ecommerce, email, SEO, and social content. The round brings total funding to $578 million at a $10 billion valuation. No word on revenue although a newspaper article last November pegged it at $500 million pre-pandemic.

But, hey, we can’t spend all our time worrying about privacy.  So let’s worry that 44% of marketers aren’t effectively targeting their marketing to improve lifetime customer value.  In fact, just 17% even do a good job of tracking it, according to Deloitte Digital and CMO Council.  Good news for CDP fans: marketers top priority for the next 12 months is building a unified customer view.

Do you sometimes hope it’s just a bad dream and we’ll wake up to find that consumers will gladly share their data?  Sorry, but AppsFlyer and MMA Global report that 73% of smartphone users are somewhat or very unlikely to allow tracking and 60% would never or just sometimes consent even if they had to pay for services instead.

Bees to honey or sharks to blood? Either way, adtech vendors keep swarming to replace lost customer identifiers. In today’s news: ad platform LoopMe reports its predictive models for inflight campaign optimization work 96% as well when identifiers are removed, apparently because they look at real-time behaviors rather than history. MetricWorks has combined econometrics and automated experiments to measure the incremental impact of mobile marketing campaigns. Amobee and InfoSum are partnering to enhance Amobee’s audience targeting with InfoSum’s privacy-safe audience data.

Salesforce is claiming a bit more Account Based Marketing turf with a pair of new features.  One uses Einstein AI to find and prioritize key accounts.  The other, more intriguingly, lets marketers create “personalized ABM campaigns for every buyer within top-tier accounts…even if they do not have any contacts for that account”.   That’s either really hard or really easy.  I think what they mean is the campaigns are ready to go when a contact does show up.

It’s probably inevitable that every targeting technique will now be described as cookie alternative. Here we have Epsilon and Verizon Media touting a ten-year-old program that tracks consumers with a combination of transactional data assembled by Epsilon and Verizon Media’s massive first-party data sets. What’s seems to be new is tighter integration between the two sets of identifiers.

By total coincidence, Verizon Media is the very first company listed as a client on SafeGraph’s Web site.  SafeGraph sells foot traffic and other data about more than 6.4 million locations in the U.S. and Canada.  They just raised a $45 million Series B, bringing their total to $61 million.

The fun-loving data department at Havas applied linear regression to 19,000 surveys with 30+ questions about 150 brands in three countries.  The result was unusually solid data on what drives satisfaction with customer experience.  Answers differ by country but for U.S. consumers the weights were 48% purchase experience, 29% relationship, and 23% brand image.  The idea is the weights should help allocate investments to the most effective projects.

The News Gods are off to a slow start this week, but they did share some interesting surveys.  Best of all is one from Tealium, which digs deeply into our favorite subject.  Most surprising finding is that respondents rate privacy protection as the top CDP outcome (64%), far ahead of acquisition (53%) and personalization (48%).  Interest in real-time data collection waned last year as users focused on more prosaic issues including ID resolution, online data capture, and integration.

IPG Media Lab and MAGNA also amped up the science, running sophisticated tests to measure the impact of optimized creative on purchases. The results were less than eye-opening: ads tailored to the customer’s journey stage work better than ads shown randomly. If you’ve been debating that at your company, find a new company.

It’s more than week since we’ve had a CDP acquisition to report, Dear Reader and I’m sad too.  Maybe you’ll feel a little better to learn that open source data integration vendor Talend was just purchased by private equity investor Thoma Bravo for $2.4 billion.  That’s a 29% premium over its closing stock price and 8.3 times 2020 revenue.