CDP Institute

You won’t find Hevo in our latest CDP list, since it only moves data from source systems into external data warehouses. It does wave the “no code” banner with a promise that non-technical users can manage it all using prebuilt connectors for more than 150 sources. The company just raised a $8 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $12 million.

No-code data connectors are easy compared with getting a computer to understand sales conversations. That’s what Chorus.ai does, going beyond transcription to writing summaries and pulling out highlights. They just raised a $45 million Series C, making their total $85 million.

I know this sounds crazy, but what if all those third-party cookies we’re so worried about losing don’t really make advertising more effective? Privacy-friendly browser Brave and Dutch publisher NPO found just that: ad revenues rose sharply when they switched from people-based to contextual targeting. Without a proper control, we don’t know if the switch to contextual was the real reason for the change, but it’s still an intriguing thought.

At first glance, this Innovid study seems to give an opposite result: 43% of consumers said that personalized ads are important. But when asked about types of personalization, 41% said contextual personalization made them more likely to click on an ad compared with 29% for behavior-based. So maybe contextual really is more effective.

Finally, we come to RudderStack, which calls itself a Customer Data Platform but doesn’t fit our definition because they don’t store the data they collect. Instead, they move data between systems in real time, which makes them an integration platform. They’re very pleased to announce a Software-as-a-Service option in addition to the original private cloud-based version. Plenty of real CDPs also offer both, although they’re not open source like RudderStack.

The pandemic may have made it harder for new companies to raise funds, but investors do seem willing to double down on companies that have already reached significant size and industry position. Case in point: cloud contact vendor Talkdesk has just raised a $143 million Series C, raising its total to $268 million and pegging its value at more than $3 billion.

Meanwhile, advertisers continue to struggle to adjust to a world without third party cookies. Marketing research agency Kantar has just announced Project Moonshot, which will marry digital publisher data on who saw which ads with behavior data from Kantar’s 100 million-member consumer panel. Partners include Google, Pandora, Dish, Pinterst, Roku, Snap, Spotify and Twitter.

Attribution platform Kochava is also upping its measurement game. They’re working with email ad vendor LiveIntent to match LiveIntent’s 290 million anonymized, email-based IDs with Kochava’s 1.7 billion email-to-device pairs. Clients will be able to add their own email-based data to the mix and use the results for activation, targeting, and measurement.

Google Cloud has launched a public beta for Recommendations AI, an ecommerce recommendation engine offered as a managed service. It scales to millions of catalog items and can be retrained daily. But if it’s really so clever, why is Google is offering everyone the same $600 credit to try it?

“Malvertising” is advertising that loads malware onto the computers of people who click it. Not good. But ad fraud solution provider Escalated.io is now offering a product that identifies malware and stops it from being served. Delightfully, the system works “post auction”, which means malvertisers still pay for the ads. Well played.

An unknown hacker has been finding unsecured online databases and replacing their contents with the word “Meow”. Cute, except that no one knows if the hacker is stealing the data first. He or she has now hit more than 1,500 databases, a reminder that poor security is common and motivator for data owners to improve it.

Those retailers downplaying security might want to think again based on this Dentsu Aegis Network study, which found that 77% of global consumers would stop doing business with a brand that lost their data or used it irresponsibly and 32% opted out of personalized advertising in the past year. There’s a very interesting set of four scenarios for how personal data use might evolve in the near future – definitely worth a look.