CDP Institute

Here’s an anti-acquisition: Antivirus software vendor Avast is shutting down its Jumpshot subsidiary, which was just revealed to be selling huge amounts of browsing data from Avast users. The data was technically anonymous and technically gathered with user consent, but new privacy attitudes now make Jumpshot’s practices harder to defend.

We have a clutch of acquisition news today, Dear Reader. Dentsu Aegis Network’s Merkle agency alone accounts for two items: purchase of data services technology company 4Cite and of B2B marketing consultancy Digital Pi. https://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2020/dentsu-aegis-network-builds-out-merkles-b2b-services 4Cite is especially interesting, since it aggregates first party information for its retail clients to understand customer intent and improve identity resolution. It’s another way to compensate for the expected demise of third party cookies.

CDP mParticle has expanded its data quality features and added the ability to add calculated attributes to customer profiles. Enhancements make it easier to import old data, manage data collection rules, and quickly activate new data streams. Some CDPs already have similar features, others do not.

One thing very few firms can boast is a $100 million Series B. ActiveCampaign just joined that exclusive club, bringing total funding to $120 million. The company sells an all-in-one email, marketing automation, and CRM system to 90,000 customers and has doubled to over 550 employees in the past year.

Mobile messaging platform Attentive has also raised more than $100 million, although it took a $70 million Series C to push them over the mark to $124 million total. They also doubled their headcount and tripled their revenue last year. But, being at the enterprise end of the spectrum, they have well under 1,000 clients.

Here’s a sign of the times: SECURITI.ai positioned itself as a privacy vendor instead of an AI vendor when it could have chosen either one. They just raised a $50 million Series B for a collection of tools that uses AI to automatically find personal data in a company’s systems, track consent, and fulfill data access requests. The company has also just launched freemium and self-service portals.

Privacy compliance is a profitable investment, according to this Cisco survey. They found companies receive an average 2.7x return on each dollar spent. Benefits including greater customer trust, improved operational efficiency, higher agility, and faster sales cycles.

Digital transformation is another project that can often feel more like a burden than a benefit. Infosys confirms that progress has been slow, with the proportion of companies at the most advanced stage of “visionary” remaining at 22% in the past three years. The most successful firms focus on empowering employees and improving customer experience rather than operational efficiency.

Raise your hand if you knew today is Data Privacy Day. (Firstname_Placeholder, did you just raise your hand? Do you think I can’t see you?) You can watch a two hour event to celebrate or you can chuckle over Facebook’s promise to provide users with privacy protections “far beyond those required by United States law” if a federal judge grants it immunity from anything illegal it might have done in the past. They didn’t mention throwing in a bridge to Brooklyn, but I guess that’s implied.

SuperAwesome is truly devoted to privacy, having started its kid-safe digital media ecosystem in 2013. They just raised $17 million from Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, bringing total funding to $58 million.

I could finish with any of several surveys showing that consumers are concerned about privacy, but even Jamie in our Department of the Obvious feels everybody knows that. So instead let’s mention that ViewN, a tiny CDP vendor in Miami, has purchased Bimotics, an equally tiny company that offers data assembly tool for the Google Cloud Platform. It appears that both firms were already run by the same people.

What with all these new privacy regulations, you might think there would be a shortage of data to match against your customer files, Dear Reader. Not so, or at least not yet. We see many announcements promising more matching than a singles cruise. For example, here’s a hookup between mobile marketing platform Vibes and Infutor’s massive store of consumer information.