CDP Institute

It’s hard to know what else you’ll like, so I’ll give you some options. Marketing ops: Mintent has bought gShift, which gives marketers a combination of content creation (Mintent) and content performance measurement (gShift). Conversational marketing: AdLingo has launched to provide conversational interfaces inside Web display ads. Customer data: mobile app developer inMobi has bought mobile user data and advertising platform Pinsight from Sprint. Note that I didn’t even bother with privacy.

We’ll start with news that industry giant Cvent is buying Social Tables, which helps event planners lay out seating charts. Their secret weapon is a database with scaled diagrams of 4 billion square feet of meeting space.

Here’s another purchase: event management software company Aventri has acquired ITN International, which offers wireless technology for registration, check-in, badges, scanning, and let’s not wonder what else. It’s Aventri’s fourth acquisition in three years, a roll-up powered by private equity firm HGGC.

Looking for still more event management excitement? Well, I hope you’re sitting down because event management tech provide Hubb has raised a $6 million Series B. That’s Series with a B that rhymes with P and stands for Pool. Wait, sorry, that’s a line from The Music Man. Sometimes I just want to burst into song.

Cloud communications platform Twilio is buying email API platform SendGrid in a deal valued at approximately $2 billion. The deal adds email to Twilio’s existing ability to let contact center agents and apps communicate with customers by phone, text, chat, and video. SendGrid says it has over 74,000 paying customers.

This is slightly stale news but the SendGrid deal reminds us that Salesforce, whose Marketing Cloud is built around what used to be leading email platform ExactTarget, recently purchased interactive email vendor Rebel. Rebel has an API that lets recipients make purchases, submit forms, and do other Web-site-ish things within an email.

We’ve been trying to find an Intern for our Department of Irony but no one takes the ad seriously. This means our regular staff had to cover this apparently-real report that ScentAir, which sprays mood-setting aromas around stores, theaters, hotels, and other places, has upped its game by creating a “cloud-based scent marketing management platform.” Sadly, our regular writers aren’t witty enough to say something clever about this.

Customer Data Platforms remain a hot topic, thank goodness. Latest fuel on the fire is MarTech Advisor’s CDP buyer’s guide. Much wisdom and a broad list of vendors. And it’s free.

Few ideas generate more talk and less action than consumers selling access to their own data. One question is how many people are important enough to advertisers for their data to be in high demand. Mobile ad network ironSource may answer this with a new feature that lets app developers measure the ad revenue generated by individual users. The idea is to help app owners identify their most valuable users and find more like them.

Individuals might earn much less ad revenue if new privacy rules start to bite.

AI might not yet be replacing copywriters, but it’s ready to replace annoying bosses who second-guess what copywriters produce. That seems to be the function of Qordoba, which “helps copywriters stay on-brand and on-message across user personas” by measuring emotion, brand adherence, language style, and tone in content. They just raised a $11.5 million Series B. Presumably Qordoba could evaluate Persado outputs but if that’s your idea of fun, you need to get out more.

Speaking of replaceable: we sometimes wonder why we’re paying Jamie, our Department of the Obvious Intern, to sit and read The New York Times. Then we remember he’s not paid. Jamie tells us that the latest scoop from The Time’s crack tech reporting team is that Internet of Things devices might spy on you. Wow.