CDP Institute

Speaking of old-school, do you remember when offices had “postal meters” to send “mail”? (Come to mention it, do you remember “offices”?) Well, those postal meters were likely made Pitney Bowes, which also had a software business related to customer data management that until it sold it last December to data integrity vendor Syncsort. Syncsort today renamed itself as Precisely.

CDPs are increasingly used by corporate IT departments, so it’s worth understanding how IT staff thinks. Integration platform vendor Cleo found that IT sees the biggest benefits from improved integration as reduced cost (66%) and meeting service level agreements (57%). Happier customers come in third at 53%. IT finds legacy applications to be the biggest integration challenge, a position marketers are more likely to share.

Industry-specific platforms are a hot item right now. Turns out there’s (at least) one for pizzerias, called Slice. It combines a Web site, search optimization, marketing automation, point of sale integration, online ordering, delivery management, and supply ordering. They just raised a $43 million Series C, bringing total funding to $73 million.

Pivotree helps companies select, deploy, and support commerce and master data management systems from vendors including Oracle, Magento, SAP, and Informatica. They just launched a rapid-implementation Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) solution to help companies add curbside pickup. Plenty of companies are making similar offers right now, so this item is our way of noting the trend.

Customer success vendor and CDP Gainsight unveiled a collection of new tools at its virtual customer conference this week. The centerpiece was Horizon, a design system for user interface and application development. Other changes include new dashboards, mobile analytics, and cross-account initiatives.

Pandemic or not, the CDP industry keeps chugging along. CDP ActionIQ has added an API integration with email engine SparkPost. ActionIQ will be able to trigger SparkPost emails in real time and will receive response information. Tighter integration between CDPs and email systems is increasingly common.

On the services side, marketing services company Allant Group has acquired the services business of martech consultants CMO Labs. The deal will beef up Allant’s CDP deployment capabilities and its digital marketing chops in general. Allant works with several CDP providers, matching different products to the needs of different clients.

Merkle, another marketing services agency, has issued its latest quarterly Customer Engagement Report. Two-thirds (67%) said privacy regulations would have a positive impact on marketing and 54% said the regulations would make them more aggressive in using first party data. Just over one-third (37%) already do personalization with first party data only while 41% use it along with third party data.

Media buying agency Horizon Media is partnering with TransUnion to identify consumers across channels for ad targeting and analysis. It’s one more example of preparing to execute “people-based” marketing programs after third party cookies are just a delicious memory.

Here’s another partnership: TV attribution vendor TVSquared is helping measure results of video ads on programmatic ad platform MediaMath. The deal was announced in April and just expanded to cover European markets. No cookies here, either.

Audio adtech vendor AdsWizz is partnering with pretty much everyone, in a manner of speaking. They have added dynamic creative optimization to their AudioMatic and AudioServe ad platforms, enabling those systems to create more than ten million audio ad variations in real time. Choices can be based on gender, age, behavioral segments, location, time of day, weather, device type, and more.

Now that Zoom meetings are part of almost everyone’s life, you may care what Zoom the company is up to. Which is, they just bought message encryption vendor Keybase and will start offering end-to-end encryption on paid accounts. They also made promised not to listen in on customer meetings or to enable decryption by government agencies, in case you thought they might.