CDP Institute

One reason for the growth of no-code is failure of corporate IT groups to meet user needs.  In fact, 62% of C-suite executives in this Experian study said a non-agile data processes hindered their response to the pandemic.  No-code fans will be pleased that user friendly tools were their top solution (35%), although they were followed closely by more conventional approaches including agile development (32%), hiring more staff (32%), and data ops (27%).

You might expect IT professionals to be the most aware of pandemic-driven data demands, but just 53% in this survey from Red Hat and Starburst said data access became more critical last year.  They did feel a need for speed: respondents said 60% of decisions require data access in under one minute and 39% require access in under one second.  No mention here of no-code but lots on how hard it is to build data pipelines, which doesn’t seem like a job for amateurs.

Let’s take a break from worrying about cookie replacements to look at a channel where the only cookies are the ones you can chew: events.  While the pandemic halted live events, the online event industry has been booming.  So much so that virtual event platform Hopin went from zero to 85,000 clients and 400 employees in less than two years.  They just raised a $400 million Series C, bringing their total funding to $571 million.

Nextech AR also supports virtual events, although it’s just one of many uses for its augmented reality technology.  Their latest venture is to add the ultimate real-world touch to their event experiences: advertising!  Yep, they’ve set up a network to sell ads to virtual event attendees.   Perhaps they can add some stale pastry and luke-warm coffee to complete the simulation.

You can bet your CEO doesn’t worry about missing cookies or stale pastries: she has staff for that.

Advertisers can hope, but the odds against person-based targeting keep falling.  Firefox just extended its already-strong anti-tracking features by adding “cookie jars” that prevent websites from sharing cookies with each other. And privacy-centric browser firm Brave just bought independent search engine Tailcat, which promises not to track users.

AT&T-owned ad platform Xandr is also clinging to the personal ID lifeboat.  It just announced “agnostic interoperability” across individual-level ad targeting solutions including Unified ID 2.0, which The Trade Desk just handed to the Prebid standards group; LiveRamp’s Authenticated Identity Infrastructure; and Europe’s netID unified log-in project.  But Xandr is also hedging its bets with support for alternatives such as modeled and contextual ad buys.

Yesterday’s announcement that Google wouldn’t support individual-level alternatives to cookie-based identifiers shouldn’t have been a surprise.  But this Lotame survey shows that 60% of U.S. senior decision makers still expect to target ads using multiple, interoperable ID solutions and 22% think just one will be enough.  Only 44% think that publishers’ first-party data is a good replacement for third-party cookies and fewer 35% of marketers think contextual advertising will do the trick.

You know it was a busy day when a $6.5 billion acquisition is our number three item. Identity platform Okta just spent that much for Auth0, which offers similar capabilities but targets application developers. Forbes quoted Okta’s CEO as saying they are competing with Microsoft, Salesforce, and Zoom to be a “primary cloud”. Zoom?

We also had a definitive announcement from Google that once it stops allowing third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, it also won’t accept similar-functioning replacements.  Specifically, Google won’t build individual-level profiles based on browsing behavior.  The move will favor publishers who collect huge stores of first party data, such as, well, Google.

Well, that was a fun day.  It started with news that CDP vendor Boxever is being bought by digital experience platform Sitecore.  It’s the latest CDP acquisition by a company wanting to unify its collection of digital experience systems.  Sitecore announced in January that it planned to spend $1.2 billion to its grow its business.

CDP BlueVenn has been purchased by Upland Software, which owns a cluster of customer engagement products including Adestra, Kapost, PostUp, and Localytics.  The company expects BlueVenn to unify and share data across all its systems.  Price was $52 million, a modest 3.5x BlueVenn’s reported revenue of $15 million.  It’s the latest of several CDP acquisitions by firms planning to connect separate customer engagement products.