CDP Institute

How’s your Dutch? Mine is non-existent, but Google Translate confirms that The Data Agency, a recently-formed combination of four Dutch data-driven marketing firms, has purchased CDP vendor Invicta. Two other components of The Data Agency, EDM and LinqID, also offer something like a CDP. Apparently the Dutch grow these like tulips.

Back on more familiar turf, Informatica has purchased GreenBay Technologies, which offers AI-based entity matching, schema matching, and metadata graphs. The tech will strengthen Informatica’s capabilities for “self-integrating systems”. Who needs citizen integrators when robots can do the job instead?

Let’s just do some straightforward martech news today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with email delivery vendor Validity, which has been on an acquisition binge. They just launched a new platform, Everest, that ties together features from several of their purchases. The company modestly says it will “give marketers everything they need to ensure email success” although it doesn’t include frills like lists, content, or products.

Cross-channel content platform Movable Ink has mostly grown its product through internal development, but it’s now thinking that acquisitions might be a good next step. The company just raised a $30 million Series C, bringing its total to $39 million, to help make that possible.

CaliberMind now styles itself as B2B marketing intelligence software but we still think of them as a CDP. They just raised $2 million, brining their total to $5.3 million.

Whether Signal called itself a CDP matters less than the fact that TransUnion felt the need to acquire Signal’s CDP-like capabilities. But if you want evidence that the bloom is off the CDP rose, here’s Gartner’s latest digital marketing hype cycle, which shows CDP well into the trough of disillusionment. Don’t take that as bad news: the whole point of the hype cycle is that the trough is a necessary stop on the path to success.

Yesterday’s items on third party cookies prompted one reader to remind me that 70% of online advertising happens within the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, where cookies are irrelevant.

We originally classified Signal as a Customer Data Platform, but the company repositioned as an identity resolution system so we took them at their word. New management has since pivoted back in the CDP direction although they don’t use the term. It’s now moot, since they were just purchased by data collection giant TransUnion, which describes them as a tool for real-time data collection and customer data management.

U.S. marketers are struggling to measure the return on their programmatic advertising investment, according to this Forrester study for MediaMath. While 94% say they try to measure programmatic ROI, just 33% say they can do it completely and accurately. More than half (55%) say privacy rules are restricting programmatic targeting and 45% say new rules are making it harder to maintain scale.

Advertisers outside the U.S. don’t share the obsession with measuring programmatic ROI, finds this IAB report. While 48% of U.S. marketers listed ROI attribution as a top objective when bringing operations programmatic in-house, just 18% of European and 19% of Latin American marketers said the same. Respondents said privacy regulations have had little impact so far on programmatic profitability. But companies are building up their first party data resources to be ready for the future.

Right on cue, here’s another report on vendors vying to replace those much-lamented third party cookies. Email ad platform LiveIntent is partnering with identify resolution vendor FullContact to createa a privacy-safe ID that tracks consumers across channels. LiveIntent is working hard at this: you may recall it has previously announced related alliances with Kochava and RubiconProject.

How loyal are new customers acquired during the pandemic? Not very, according to this Braze survey. While 26% of consumers have tried at least one new brand during the pandemic, their retention rate is 82% lower than customers added during previous non-COVID, non-holiday periods. A whopping 91% said they’ll consider how brands behaved during the pandemic when deciding where to shop in the future.