CDP Institute

Uberflip delivers B2B content to individuals while PathFactory tracks content consumption. Combining their functions makes enough sense that PathFactory just bought Uberflip. One surprise: despite Uberflip’s arguably higher profile, the combined company will continue under the PathFactory name.

Preliminary findings under the EU Digital Services Act allege that X deceives users by awarding blue checks to untrustworthy accounts. X is also accused of breaches through restricting researcher access to publicly available data like posts and to an adequate advertising library. Threatened with fines of up to 6% of annual turnover, Elon Musk has promised a court battle.

As privacy rules limit access to third-party customer data, data clean rooms offer a privacy-safe way for companies to share data directly.  LiveRamp reports that 76% of more than 200 survey respondents have used data clean rooms, a 60% surge on last year. An even higher 82% plan to collaborate with data partners in the next year.

The CDP industry showed growth over the past year with a dozen vendors appearing in the new CDP Industry Update Report from the CDP Institute. Most of these were previously marketing or messaging applications that added CDP capabilities after they were built. Industry revenue was estimated at $2.4 billion in 2024, up from $2.3 in 2023.

Scaled deal activity in the digital media and marketing space was up 44% YoY in Q2 2024. This was thanks to dialogue in the foregoing quarters translating into closed deals in Q2. M&A activity was up for the second consecutive quarter following a relatively barren 2023.

Newsguard, the rating system for news and information websites, announced the launch of a monthly AI News Misinformation Monitor to evaluate how the top genAI models respond to prompts based on misinformation in the news. The top 10 LLMs (more will be added) did not quite ace the test, but didn’t totally fail either. Forty-one percent debunked the falsehoods while 30% repeated them.

MessageGears describes itself as a “warehouse-native customer engagement platform”, which is buzzword-heavy but accurate. They just expanded the “warehouse-native” part by integrating with AI capabilities in Snowflake Cortex. Last month they ventured into the Composable CDP territory (a term they pointedly avoid) by adding 250+ endpoint activations and reverse ETL.

Customer engagement platform Braze is also invading Composable CDP turf.  They just launched Braze Data Platform, which will collect and unify first-party data through no-copy integrations with data clouds like AWS, Databricks and Snowflake. It will also distribute data to selected third-party tools for deeper analytics and customer intelligence.

Claravine’s Data Standards Cloud aims to improve data consistency throughout an organization by establishing standards set out on a single dashboard. Claravine has released Powered by Snowflake (yes, them again) which will let marketers apply data standards, including metadata, directly to data in Snowflake. Sounds like fun.

CDP BlueConic has acquired Jebbit, self-described as both a first-party data capture and an experience creation platform. Jebbit enables the acquisition of customer data through custom quizzes, surveys and similar experiences that marketers can create using its AI-powered interface. This data can be used to enrich the enterprise customer data held by BlueConic.

Plans for Google parent Alphabet to acquire HubSpot have been shelved, sources told Bloomberg. The talks did not get as far as addressing due diligence. Rumor or not, the effect on HubSpot’s shares was real, down 11% when the story broke.

The Data and Trust Alliance has announced the availability of new data provenance standards (1.0.0). They emerged from work on cross-industry standards undertaken by Alliance members such as American Express, Humana, IBM, Mastercard, Pfizer, UPS, and Walmart. Adoption of the standards should improve data quality and reduce the review time before using datasets to train AI models.