CDP Institute

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.

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?

Also on the bot front, we have Discovery Bot from Automation Anywhere, which doesn’t talk to you at all. It just watches and figures out how automate things you do repeatedly. The goal is to discover business processes but I guess it could also stalk you ex on Facebook.

Not quite a bot but close: digital agency Jellyfish has leveraged the Google Cloud Vision API to analyze performance of video and dynamic ad content and recommend the best-performing items for new ads. You could have people do that but it would be a lot of work and nowhere near as impressive.

Looking for something to read when you get trapped at home by coronavirus? This 247-page compendium of global digital statistics from We Are Social and Hootsuite includes everything from population statistics to the gender split of Snapchat users in Qatar. Did you know that people in the U.S. have more smart home devices than average but make less use of voice search? Or that Americans are more concerned about misuse of their data but less likely to use ad blockers? Hours of fun.

How serious is Salesforce about selling to CMOs? Well, they just bought The CMO Club, an organization where this exclusive group gathers for learning, commiseration, and who-knows-what secret rituals. The club has 30 global chapters and 650+ members.

At the other end of the exclusivity spectrum, 74% in a sample of the entire U.S. population told the Pew Research Center that they had little or no confidence that companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google would prevent misuse of their platforms during the 2020 presidential election.

There’s nothing like a juicy CDP funding to start the week. mParticle has obliged with a $45 million Series D extension, bringing its total to $121 million and vaulting it from ninth to fourth place on the most-funded-CDP list. They also announced a LiveRamp partnership to append external identity data to a company’s own information.

LiveRamp has its own news: a Safe Haven platform that lets brands and publishers share data directly. These “second party data” deals are increasingly common as companies try to compensate for the loss of third party data without being trapped in the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. I’m toying with “walled puddles” to describe the mini-gardens of data from the smaller publishers.

No one worries more about the loss of cookies than DMP vendors, whose business was built on them. Piano, which sells a DMP along with other audience management technologies, is trying to combine its first-party DMP with “zero party data”, the industry term for information that consumers provide voluntarily. The resulting platform, Piano Zero, offers features to collect that data and use it for segmentation and ad targeting.

One of the stories we’ve been chasing this year is growth of the B2B data market. Here’s another episode: ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg, has filed for a $500 million Initial Public Offering. The S-1 shows $293 million revenue in 2019 and a $84 million loss, due mostly to $102 million interest expense on $1.2 billion in long term debt.