CDP Institute

Whether marketers really want broad scope suites is questionable: recent surveys from Merkle and Gartner suggest not. This TrustRadius study shows that marketers often misunderstand what buyers really want, overprioritizing chatbots, digital events, and case studies, and undervaluing reviews and free trials. Of course, what people say and what they do are not always the same, either. Are you confused yet?

Of course, when it comes to misalignment, nothing beats the marketing-IT relationship. This Infosys study finds that marketers see the biggest collaboration challenges as improving customer experience and agility while IT managers focus more on skills, company culture, and budgets. There’s a lot more here but the bottom line is companies with better collaboration get better results.

Cheetah Digital has added real-time personalization, multi-step customer journeys, and intelligent offers to its suite of cross-channel engagement tools. The new tools enable Cheetah clients to orchestrate individually-tailored experiences across time and channels. It all sits on Cheetah’s CDP, which it calls an “engagement data platform”.

Today’s Golden Denture Award for toothless regulation goes to the Federal Trade Commission for not fining Zoom after discovering Zoom didn’t offer end-to-end encryption as promised during the early stages of the current pandemic. The FTC did require that Zoom promise to try harder with steps including an annual risk assessment, vulnerability management program, and blocking use of security credentials it knows have been compromised. My kitten has a sharper bite.

European tech regulators have been more aggressive. Their latest act is a formal accusation by the European Commission that Amazon improperly used third-party merchant data on its platform to benefit Amazon’s own business. The Commission also announced a second probe into preferential treatment for Amazon’s own products and merchants who use Amazon fulfillment services.

Adobe is buying work management platform Workfront for $1.5 billion. The deal will add workflow orchestration to Adobe’s quiver of marketing tools. Look for similar acquisitions by Adobe competitors.

Account based marketing platform Terminus has purchased GrowFlare, which creates “psychographic” profiles of target accounts. It’s somewhat similar to EverString, which ZoomInfo purchased last week. Crunchbase say it’s the company’s fourth acquisition, although somehow it feels like they’ve done more.

And yet another acquisition: mobile ad analytics platform Kochava has purchased Thalamus, which has built a database of ad publishers. It positions the deal as a way to target based on content now that privacy rules are making it harder to target specific individuals.

Ushur offers an AI-based, no-code platform to build self-service customer experience workflows. Lots of buzzwords there, although they did miss blockchain and privacy-safe. They still tick enough boxes to have raised a $25 million Series B, bringing their total to $36 million.

When MacDonald’s bought personalization platform Dynamic Yield, everyone expected its menus would soon be tailored to individuals. But Burger King has apparently beaten them to it. Digital menu boards will show drive-through customers offers based on the individual’s purchase history and loyalty status well as local conditions and time of day. The tech was developed in-house by Burger King parent corporation Restaurant Brands International, which will also deploy it at its Tim Hortons and Popeyes subsidiaries.

Burger King will likely identify its customers through a mobile app, not cookies, so we have no excuse for food-related wordplay. The Trade Desk, on the other hand, is hungrily eyeing the cookie-replacement market for its Unified ID 2.0. They just signed Nielsen as a partner, following last week’s news that Criteo and LiveRamp are on board.

Intent data is also on the menu at ZoomInfo, which has acquired B2B data and solutions vendor EverString. They gain 100 million company records and 70 million professional profiles, including intent signals.