CDP Institute

Marketers already wrestling with COVID-19 messaging now face new choices related to racial inequality and police violence. This Morning Consult poll finds most people want companies to make an official statement about protests, although support for protestors or police was less popular than helping businesses recover from looting. Preferences split sharply between white and black Americans and to a much lesser extent between older and younger groups.

B2B CDP Leadspace is previewing a real-time data integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which is Microsoft’s own CDP. The connector should be generally available later this summer. Yes, it’s confusing, but it’s increasingly common for a data-gathering CDP like Leadspace to feed an analytical CDP like Customer Insights.

Adtech vendor Criteo is making it easier for brands to purchase ads on retailer Web sites and apps with a self-service media buying platform. Several advantages here: an alternative to the Facebook/Google/Amazon triopology, targeting based with the retailers’ own first-party data, more efficient media buying, and more revenue source for struggling retailers.

Nearly all (95%) of technology departments have shifted priorities due to the pandemic, AppDynamics reports. On a positive note: 71% said they’ve implemented in weeks projects that would otherwise have taken months or years. And 88% said digital customer experience is now their top priority.

Trying to stay positive: LeadMD found that 54% of B2B buyers are still buying despite COVID-19, while 26% have stopped making purchases. (The other 21% weren’t planning to buy anything to begin with.) Just 4% think brands should stop all marketing, although 15% think they should do less and 26% think they should be more sensitive.

Marketing and sales departments lag in their adoption of agile techniques, according to this report from Digital.ai. Software development (37%) and IT (26%) were most frequent users, compared with 7% of marketing and 5% of sales and sales operations teams. Just 51% of respondents said agile is used by more than half of all teams in their company.

Meanwhile, application modernization vendor Advanced reported that 85% of companies prefer agile for their modernization initiatives. Nearly three-quarters (74%) have previously failed to complete a modernization project but 98% intend to start a new one.

Bots account for nearly half of the tweets about coronavirus and have pushed more than 100 false narratives on the topic, according to this Carnegie Mellon University study. Just a friendly reminder that much of what you see on social media is paid for by people aiming to do harm.

All funding news today, Dear Reader. Top item is a $50 million Series D for AI-powered retail personalization vendor Bluecore, bringing its total raise to $113 million. Unlike BlueConic, BlueVenn, and Blueshift, Bluecore is not a CDP. They do have a rare pricing model based entirely on shared customer success.

Open source start-up RudderStack also isn’t quite a CDP. They gather event data and resolve identities, but then pass the results to other systems instead of storing them. They just raised a $5 million seed round.

Truthset has emerged from stealth with $4.75 million in seed funding. They plan to score the quality of data marketers purchase from other vendors, mostly by comparing information from different sources. Interesting concept but the value depends on how well they judge which sources to trust.

The latest phase in pandemic marketing is announcing how you help companies reopen. Cloud-based workforce management vendor Workday is on top of the trend with a new integration with Salesforce’s Work.com office safety suite. Workday also announced integration with Microsoft Teams and availability on the Microsoft Azure cloud.