CDP Institute

Adoption of advanced technologies always lags behind the hype. Internet of Things and Augmented Reality are two well-worn examples. Boston Consulting Group and PTC found deployment has been concentrated in heavy industry, technology, engineering, and aerospace: that is, businesses involving equipment maintenance and manufacturing. So don’t be surprised that marketing use is lagging.

Digital transformation occupies a meta-hype class of its own. Marketers will be pleased that this Mindtree study found Digital Officers are most successful at improving digital experience. They’ll be less happy to learn that the vast majority of CDOs come from IT (69%), while just 8% come from marketing or sales.

Raise your hand if you’ve started to eat chocolate chips straight from the bag. I thought so. Here’s the CDP newsletter equivalent of comfort food: a study from ecommerce platform Kibo finds that personalization works just great and more works even better. “Retailers with a marketing-led cross channel personalization strategy are most likely to earn ROI of 400% or more.” Yum.

Ad management platform TapClicks has purchased paid search analytics vendor AdStage. The deal is TapClicks’ fourth acquisition in the past year, part of a strategy to become a unified marketing platform. Whatever that is.

Meanwhile, customer/employee/B2B experience platform Medallia just made their seventh purchase in the past months, scooping up speech-to-text platform Voci Technologies. Price was $59 million.

We have a rare bundle of CDP news for you today, Dear Reader. Let’s start with Arm Treasure Data, which just announced early access to a new customer journey orchestration module, 20 new data connectors, and improvements in privacy compliance, platform administration, and user identity federation.

CDP Tealium is also upgrading its connectors. They have added a no-code interface that lets non-technical users set up integrations to the AudienceStream CDP and EventStream API Hub. Citizen integrators of the world unite!

Finally, CDP Audiens announced an $8 million strategic investment from South Korea’s NHN Corp. In addition to cash, Audiens will gain access to data from NHN’s game, payment, IT and advertising businesses.

Analytics platform Profitero also has funding news: a $20 million Series B on top of $28.7 million raised previously. The company helps enterprise ecommerce marketers to optimize Amazon sales, analyze search results, and benchmark against other online retailers.

Marketing technology vendor AdRoll hasn’t raised money but they did launch a suite of marketing tools including email, product recommendations, and cross-channel measurement. Yes, they still do digital advertising and retargeting. Target market is direct-to-consumer companies. Pricing starts at free.

Marketing analytics vendor Adverity just announced a $30 million Series C, bringing their total funding to $50 million. Adverity ingests data from 400+ sources, visualizes the results, and offers AI-based insights. Its about campaign-level measurement than individual customers, so not a CDP.

Widespread reports about Zoom security problems https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes have given a second chance to competitors. Microsoft and Google are responding with minor tweaks. Google now lets users start a Google Meet session from within Gmail, https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/meet-in-gmail.html while Microsoft promised (on Twitter) that Teams users will be able to see videos of up to nine chat participants by the end of April. https://twitter.com/MicrosoftTeams/status/1249729067408072704