CDP Institute

Few people expect email systems to do identity resolution, thank goodness. But Front is adding many other functions to your inbox, mostly to combine email, texts, direct messages, and other inputs in one location and to support collaboration with (or against) co-workers. They just raised a $59 million Series C, bringing their total to $138 million.

Pivoting to consumer email, here’s a report from Pure360 and the Data & Marketing Association. It holds few surprises: people want fewer emails, they sign up mostly for discounts and offers, and most think the majority of their emails lack value. That said, they still prefer email over other channels for most purposes.

Mobile marketing attribution and ad fraud prevention AppsFlyer has raised a $210 million Series D, bringing total funding to $294 million. The system integrates with several thousand other products, opening the door to more than just analytics. In fact, they already provide audience segmentation, treading gently onto CDP turf.

What information do mobile advertisers really need? This Forrester study for Yieldmo argues that customer attention is a critical information, even though 84% of marketers can’t measure it today. Guess what Yieldmo does.

Fraud and brand safety are also major concerns in the advertising world. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a coalition of giant advertisers and media companies, has announced its plan to address the problem by identifying and avoiding harmful online content. Coalition members control nearly $100 billion in media spend, a significant chunk of the $600 billion or so total. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/global-ad-spend-has-slowed-but-2020-looks-set-to-be-a-bumper-year.html

We all know that 2/2 is National Repeat Yourself Day, but let’s celebrate early by reporting things we’ve reported before. We’ll start with this Nielsen study that finds just 28% of marketers make data quality their top priority, ranking it behind audience targeting, ad creative, and reach. In fact, Nielsen says marketers are creatures of habit who do many irrational things. We are shocked.

One of our favorite points to repeat is that consumers care less about personalization than value. This Zendesk report makes it yet again, finding that vastly more consumers say price (62%) and service (57%) make them feel loyal to a brand, than personalization and promotions (27%). In fact, 23% said they don’t want any personalization at all.

We never tire of reminding you that tech vendors threaten everyone’s privacy. Our latest offering is this VentureBeat story about efforts to regulate facial recognition. Dare we spy a glimmer of hope?

If your definition of joy is running omni-channel retail on an iPhone, then NewStore is your new best friend. They promise their one system does everything, which may appeal to people who doubt that integrating lots of systems can really be simple. Newstore just raised $20 million in new funding from backers including Salesforce Ventures, bringing their total to $130 million.

$20 million? Hah! scoff our friends at Funnel, who just raised $47 million for their marketing data collection and transformation system. It works with campaign data, not customer profiles, so it’s no CDP. Total funding is $68 million, if Newstore is keeping score.

Enough about money. Let’s worry instead about what we’ll do when privacy rules prevent us from targeting ads with individual data. GumGum’s got you covered, with a system that will automatically categorize content so you can match your ads to what people are reading. It will also avoid those awkward brand safety discussions when your ads appear in the wrong places.

CDP Segment and 200 of its closest friends have launched the “Platform of Independents”, a collection of companies that pledge to build technology doesn’t lock users into any one CRM platform and makes it easy to share data across departments. Sort of like a CDP is supposed to do.