CDP Institute

SheerID calls itself an “identity marketing” vendor, meaning it verifies that people who sign up for offers limited to groups such as students, military, or healthcare workers are really members of those groups.  They do this by collecting a ton of data while somehow keeping within privacy rules.  In fact, they’re so good at the privacy bit that they’re expanding into 13 European countries, GDPR notwithstanding.

Of course, the death of third party cookies is the mother of all privacy challenges. Google just released research showing that its favored alternative, which assigns consumers to segments based on their Website visits but doesn’t share individual IDs, gives nearly the same results as cookie-based techniques. Experts are split on whether the approach, called FLoC for reasons that are too complicated to explain, is a meaningful privacy improvement.

Earlier this month, NGDATA announced a program that lets other software companies embed its CDP into their products.  “NGDATA Inside” goes beyond standard API connectors to build direct integrations with partner products.  It saves partners the effort of building or buying a CDP of their own.

Raise your hand if you think the problem with today’s news industry is that Facebook doesn’t have enough control over the news people see.  But you’re not in charge, Dear Reader, so they’re launching a UK version of the Facebook News program that’s been live in the U.S. since June. Story selection is based on a mix of curation and personal behaviors.  Facebook shares a few crumbs of revenue with news providers.

While we’re on the subject, Twitter is also trying to improve its news content.  They just launched cutely-named Birdwatch, which will let vetted users flag and notate misleading Tweets.  Let’s be blunt: the list of things that could go wrong is far longer than the list of things that could go right.

Big Tech is increasingly on the defensive these days.  One front is Australia’s demand that Google pay news organizations for links to their content.  Google threatened last week to remove its search engine from Australia rather than comply.  Remember when Google said there’s no need for anti-trust regulation because it faces so much competition?

Google probably doesn’t consider B2B identity resolution vendor Versium as a competitor.  But Versium is positioning its latest offering as a way to escape from Google and other “walled gardens”.  The extension lets its REACH platform connect business professionals to their consumer identities, giving B2B marketers more ways to reach them and letting consumer marketers target them too.

Speaking of B2B marketing, this LinkedIn study finds that B2B tech buyers are like consumers: they rank price and features as most important when selecting a new vendor.  Less expected: 63% of tech purchases are influenced by functions outside of IT.  Call them  “citizen tech buyers” if that makes you happy.

Acquia, which owns the former AgilOne CDP, has launched a partner community to simplify integration of other systems with Acquia’s digital experience platform. Illustrating what’s possible, they also announced Acquia Digital Commerce, which combines Acquia components with commercetools’ ecommerce platform and Lucidworks’ product discovery solution.

Marketing services and data company V12 has been bought by new mover data collector Porch Group, which specializes in the home services industry. V12 brings its own mover data and lots of other consumer information to the party. The deal is one of four acquisitions announced simultaneously by Porch Group.

The Data Agency, a combination of several customer-data-related firms in the Netherlands and Belgium, has integrated its Invicta and LynqID CDP groups. The combined brand will be called Invenna, which was already the name of Invicta’s product. Invenna will be supported by consumer data and data quality solutions from other The Data Agency components.

Does it seem odd that this Treasure Data report found literally 99% of $1 billion-plus retailers have either installed a CDP (40%) or plan to (59%)?  The data makes a bit more sense when you see two-thirds (67%) of those planning add a CDP expected to build, not buy.  That suggests they’re defining a CDP as any type of central customer database.  Download for more on customer data use.