CDP Institute

I’m sure there’s a reason that Tel Aviv-based Web analytics start-up Oribi named itself after a small African antelope, although it might simply be an excuse to make hoodies with horns.  Their fashion sense extends to their product positioning, which adds trendy no-code bling to Web analytics.  The company just raised a $15.5 million Series B, bringing total funding to $27.9 million.

As adtech vendors scramble for cookie substitutes, it’s easy to confuse ID systems used for targeting and systems for attribution.  The big difference is that targeting systems need to identify as many people as possible while attribution systems can use a sample.  Nielsen’s ID resolution system, announced last November, is aimed squarely at attribution: it uses first party data such as email addresses and device IDs to build a comprehensive picture of behaviors for a limited set of people and then validates the results against Nielsen panel data.  They just... Read More >

Fifty seven percent of companies polled in this Merkle study are personalizing experiences in at least five channels and 59% have a consolidated customer profile.  But consumers are not impressed: just 35% say that marketing and advertising meets their needs.  Lots more here on CDP adoption, who’s in charge of CX, and obstacles to using data.

Investors are clearly impressed with Highspot.  The sales enablement company just raised a $200 million Series E, doubling its previous total of $197 million and valuing the company at $2.3 billion.  Highspot says that usage also doubled from 2019 to 2020.

Low-code development platform Creatio also has new money, taking $68 million in its first round ever. In addition to its development tools, Creatio offers a prebuilt CRM with marketing, sales, and service systems including a unified customer database. Users can modify these to their hearts’ content.

Like an imminent hanging, the approaching enforcement of Apple’s new privacy rules has concentrated marketers’ minds on adjusting to the situation rather than waiting to be rescued by an-as-unbuilt universal identifier. We wrote last week about AppsFlyer’s approach. Now we also have the Post-IDFA Alliance, a consortium of mobile adtech firms offering a resource center with helpful advice and perhaps a little sympathy. Facebook has also launched a site on the topic. Of course, Facebook just got caught knowingly publishing inflated audience data, so examine that gift horse very carefully.

Cisco has completed its $730 million acquisition of customer experience platform IMImobile.  The deal, announced last December, marks a major expansion of Cisco’s footprint in customer-facing systems.  Cisco already owns Webex, Voicea, and Cloudcherry but lacks a CDP.  So far.

CDPs complement, not replace, other martech systems, according to this Treasure Data survey.  Nearly all (95%) of CDP users also have a CRM system, 89% have a DMP, and 79% of a data warehouse or data lake.  Download to learn about CDP use cases, benefits, data sources, and more.

Amazon has purchased Selz, a small business ecommerce and marketing system that competes with Shopify.  It’s a logical step on Amazon’s path to world domination.  The deal happened last month but no one noticed until recently.

Here’s more old news: last December, LinkedIn announced Sales Insights, a data enrichment service that pushes information on LinkedIn’s 722 million members to Salesforce and other systems.  It’s still worth reporting given the unique scope of LinkedIn’s data.  As a bonus, the blog post announcing general availability doubles as a primer on how to assemble clean customer data.

A frightening 59% of U.S. sales leaders in this SugarCRM survey say their CRM system is costing them revenue and 61% can’t see all their marketing, sales, and service data.  Figures for UK, Germany, and Australia are a little better.  Also intriguing: despite incomplete data, 89% are already using artificial intelligence and 93% expect to use it more.

B2B CDP Leadspace and data compiler ZoomInfo have announced a strategic partnership that will give Leadspace “platform-level integration” with ZoomInfo data.  Tight integration of third-party data, especially about non-customers, is much more common among B2B CDPs than B2C CDPs.  But you knew that.