CDP Institute

In a far different corner of the galaxy, Instacart announced a $265 million financing round for its pandemic-fueled online grocery business.  The raise brings total funding to $2.7 billion and values the company at $39 billion.    This has more to do with martech than you may think: some of the money will grow Instacart marketplace and advertising services that leverage its massive customer base.

Disney is also expanding its data-driven ad business, launching a programmatic exchange for video ads, leveraging its data for cross-channel targeting, and selling combined inventory across Hulu and Disney properties.  They’re even promoting their own Disney Audience Graph as a partial replacement for third-party cookies.  Isn’t everyone?

Tighter privacy regulations were supposed to deter companies from sharing their customer data, right?  But this Winterberry Group paper gives a mixed message: it reports that 64% of U.S. respondents are collaborating directly others to share their data in a second-party relationship.  Yet at least as many are also licensing their data to third parties for targeting and measurement.

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.