CDP Institute

LiveIntent, which sells advertising within emails, has entered the race to replace third party cookies. The Rubicon Project ad exchange will embed a LiveIntent identifier, based on hashed email address, in prebid headers. This lets advertisers track individuals across Web sites without revealing their actual identities.

CDP vendor Segment has analyzed the tools its 20,000 clients send data it collects from Web sites and mobile apps. They found the fastest growing categories during the pandemic lockdowns were ad tracking tools, including Facebook Pixel and Google Ads, and customer success tools including Salesforce, Zendesk, and New Relic. They explain the growth in ad tracking tools as reflecting a shift to digital advertising and the growth in customer success tools as reflecting more interest in retention.

Adventure! Drama! Comedy! You won’t find any of those in the news that Walmart has expanded its third-party Web marketplace to include Shopify merchants. But it’s still a reminder of Walmart’s continued development as an Amazon alternative.

Attribution! I can deliver on that one. TV measurement company 605 has launched a new service to measure the impact of TV ads on consumer behavior. The solution connects viewership data on 21 million U.S. households with data on foot traffic, purchases, or other behaviors.

Targeting! Location-based marketing vendor GroundTruth has added Connected TV and desktop ad targeting, allowing marketers to reach people who visit particular locations when they’re somewhere else. This supplements GroundTruth’s core ability to reach those people on their mobile devices. Fun!

No one really knows what the post-COVID-19 world will look like, but everybody has an opinion. Let’s look at some today. We’ll start with this survey of marketers from The 614 Group, which found that just 19% expected in-person conferences will reach their pre-pandemic levels but 76% said they personally expect to attend. I’d interpret that to mean attendance is more likely than it seems. More here on what people miss most about their office (hint: it’s not their boss).

Retail and restaurant companies have been hit hardest by lock-downs, so it might not be surprising that 83% of C-level executives told Cambridge Retail Advisors that their industries will be changed forever. Just 65% plan to reopen all their locations and 53% feel most consumers will exclusively shop online with in-store (BOPIS) or at-curb pickup (BOPAC).

Other industries haven’t been as severely disrupted as retail, so it makes sense that under two-thirds of senior business and IT executives from a broad range of industries told Telstra that COVID-19 had changed their organizations forever. Interesting regional disparities: 63% of European companies said they expect to close branches or reduce headquarters offices compared with just 40% of U.S. and North Asian respondents. And U.S. companies were more likely to than others to prioritize cost over revenue as their main digital transformation goal.

Cloud data warehouse vendor Snowflake has confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering, according to news reports. Snowflake is used by many CDP systems. Value could be as high as $20 billion.

There are still more grains of sand on the beach than vendors finding personal data in corporate databases but it’s starting to depend on the beach.

Microsoft today joined Amazon and IBM in limiting the privacy nightmare that is facial recognition software. IBM has left the business entirely, Amazon banned use by the police for one year, and Microsoft said they won’t sell for police use until a national regulation is in place. Yes, there’s some virtue signaling involved and there are plenty of other companies still in the business. But it’s a step in the right direction.

Data aggregator Neustar will provide identity resolution and data enrichment to CDP Quaero. The deal illustrates how third party data enables companies to find matches and make updates they could not discover with their own data alone.