CDP Institute

Recommendation engines are only as good as their data, and many companies don’t have enough data of their own to be useful.  PreciseTarget is filling the gap with product affinity profiles on 200 million U.S. shoppers based on more than five billion retail transactions from 1,000 merchants.   Marketers can add preference scores to existing customers and send targeted prospect lists to media partners.

You’re probably interested in the rumors about Google’s plans for a watered-down version of Apple’s anti-device-tracking policies, Dear Reader, but this newsletter deals only in hard, cold facts. So instead I’ll report that Amazon’s product recommendation technology is now available to Shopify merchants. The connection is an app from HiConversion, which uses the Amazon Personalize engine on Amazon Web Services.

Let’s do some martech mind-reading today, Dear Reader.  First we’ll look at B2B tech marketing community FINITE’s survey, which found that 65% of respondents plan to increase use of martech in 2021 and 75% plan to focus on personalization.   That’s cheery!

CMO Council also had upbeat results: 69% said they plan higher martech spend in 2021.  But there was an odd disconnect in their approach: while journey management and digital strategies were their top targets for business improvement, their highest martech priority was analytics.

And what do IT leaders think?  Adobe found they rank CDPs (33%) second only to predictive analytics (37%) in impact on customer experience, well ahead of chatbots, robotic process automation, and other advanced technologies.  Two-thirds said IT was solely (31%) or jointly (37%) in charge of martech, compared with 15% who said marketing was in control.  You’d likely get a different answer if you polled a bunch of marketers.

CDP Tealium yesterday announced a $96 million Series G funding, raising their total to $264 million.  It’s the second-largest CDP funding round in our files and puts Tealium in second place for total CDP funding.  Segment, now part of Twilio, is the leader in both categories.

CRM vendor Hubspot has agreed to buy The Hustle, which publishes a daily newsletter, podcast, and research for entrepreneurs.  LinkedIn says The Hustle has 100+ employees, who will now help Hubspot pump out even more content than it does already.

Open source, highly secure collaboration platform Rocket.Chat has raised $19 million, more than double its previous total of $7.9 million.  The system positions itself as a Slack alternative that supports all types of communications, integrates easily with other platforms, and protects privacy by letting users host their own data.  The Brazil-based company says the system is installed on 845,000 servers in 150 countries.

B2B CDP Leadspace has raised a $46 million round, bringing their total to $107 million.  The company specializes in enterprise-scale deployments with clients including Salesforce, American Express, Zoom, Microsoft, and Verizon.

Twitter has purchased email newsletter technology vendor Revue.  It may seem an odd adjunct to Twitter’s core business, but the company points out that many journalists rely on Twitter as a source and outlet, so newsletters will help them further interact with their audiences.

Contextual ads are an alternative to identity-based targeting that relies on cookies.  But contextual ad network Infolinks has combined the two by enhancing ad bids with identity profiles from device graph builder Intent IQ.  It’s possible because Intent IQ builds its profiles without using cookies or advertising device IDs (MAIDs).

The CDP industry added 25% more employees and 35% more companies in 2020 and will reach over $1.5 billion in revenue in 2021, according to the CDP Institute’s just-released Industry Update report.  Most growth comes from companies combining CDP capabilities with campaign and delivery features, although a core of data-only CDPs has also been successful.   Lots of colorful graphs.