CDP Institute

Next, programmatic ad audience platform Criteo has teamed with creative optimization platform Jivox to deploy integrated campaigns. Criteo recommends audiences and products to Jivox, which builds and tests ad variations, which Criteo then serves to it audiences, which it refines based on results reported by Jivox. Sweet.

We end with a Jekyll and Hyde story: ad blocking and virtual private network products from Sensor Tower have been sharing data on the users they are supposed to protect. The leaks were uncovered by BuzzFeed, which reports that many of Sensor Tower apps were removed from Android and iOS app stores for policy violations. Sensor Tower says only anonymized data was shared for analytical purposes.

This is not the happiest moment for the event management industry. But coronavirus too shall pass, so event marketing automation vendor Banzai has proceeded with a $7 million Series A funding.

There’s a growing trend to doing commerce within social media and messaging. FastForward.ai is on it, with a platform that enables mobile operators and enterprises to create digital engagement, commerce and payments inside social and messaging apps. They just announced that an $8 million seed round of funding.

The growth of privacy technology is another trend worth following. The latest news is privacy-safe search engine vendor DuckDuckGo sharing its auto-updated list of internet domains that track people online. The list is 5,326 domains and growing.

Just after we finished scratching our head over Salesforce’s acquisition of The CMO Club, email giant Mailchimp announced it had bought Courier Media, a London-based publisher whose main product is a 100,000-circulation print magazine for small-business people (not small business-people). So, martech vendors owning media organizations is apparently now a Thing. Let’s interpret it as vendors ensuring they can reach their audiences without relying third party data.

More definitely related to new privacy rules: a company called Saymine recently launched with the business model of making it easier to find which companies have your data and ask them to delete it. At present all they do is to scan your email inbox to identify which firms you have dealt with, which is just the tiniest and least intrusive tip of the iceberg. Presumably they have broader ambitions.

I could finish with any of a half-dozen privacy surveys but you know what they say. So let’s instead report that personalization vendor Dynamic Yield has added the ability to import offline purchases and match them to online identities. If doing that separately for each of your martech systems sounds inefficient, let me introduce you to my friend Customer Data Platform.

Sticking with do-it-yourself, tech portfolio company Redbrick has purchased Leadpages, a no-code Web site builder aimed at small businesses. Redbrick also owns digital publishing company Assembly, digital workflow system Shift, and browser development company Rebase. Its companies all run separately.

Let’s finish with another citizen Web site builder, since that makes it a trend. Shogun creates storefronts on Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, and Magento back-ends, putting the “head” in “headless commerce.” They recently raised $10 million, bringing total funding to $12 million.

Like much of the tech industry, the News Gods seem to be phoning it in this week. They did offer a modestly interesting acquisition: CRM vendor Pipedrive purchased email marketing automation system Mailigen. Interesting because the idea seems to be for salespeople to run their own automated email campaigns. Maybe that makes them “citizen marketers”.

We have no real news today so let’s just amuse ourselves with tech. We’ll start with a “second-generation support chatbot” from Intercom, which answers questions as soon as users start typing. You might find that rude but the vendor says it shows the system truly understands customers’ problems. Feel better?