CDP Institute

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.

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.

Avoiding a different type of lock-in, Google last week announced that privacy-safe search engine DuckDuckGo won its auction to be offered as an alternative search provider in Android devices across all 31 European markets. The auction was a result of anti-trust action by the European Union. Info.com will also appear in all markets while PrivacyWall, Qwant, Yandex, and GMX split third place.

Try not to laugh: telecommunications giant Verizon has launched its own privacy-focused search engine, named OneSearch. They promise to avoid cookies, data sharing, storing search history, or tailoring search results to previous behavior. The product is from Verizon Media, which will fund it by selling ads targeted only (well, mostly) on the current search keywords.

Some days this newsletter just writes itself. Here’s news that CDP ActionIQ has raised a $32 million Series C, bringing total funding to $75 million. They also list a collection of impressive wins at enterprise clients.

And here’s a $40 million Series C from ABM platform 6sense. This brings their total to $105 million. 6sense has been on a roll since repositioning from predictive analytics to ABM.

Enough about enterprise software. All you Citizen Developers will want to know that Google has just bought AppSheet, a no-code development platform. It can build processes that use data from pretty much any cloud source including Google Sheets, Forms, Maps, and Analytics, as well as non-Google platforms including Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS DynamoDB and MySQL.

Half of the systems deployed as Customer Data Platforms do not meet minimum CDP requirements, a Tealium survey found. Fifty percent of users said their CDP can’t ingest data from any channel, 50% can’t stitch together multiple identifiers to create a single customer view, and 59% cannot activate data in real time. That these users think they have a CDP shows how confused buyers have been. But 58% of users plan to switch to a new CDP, offering hope that experienced buyers will make better choices on their second try.

Messaging vendor MessageGears has another survey about customer data management, focusing on cloud-based “modern data warehouse” platforms such as Azure, BigQuery, Redshift, and Snowflake. Benefits of moving to a cloud warehouse include flexibility (26%), security (22%), 360-degree customer view (20%), time savings (19%), and better segmentation and personalization (14%). More than half of users say the change has yielded “significant” customer benefits.

Switching gears, as it were: Google has announced that Chrome will end support for third-party cookies within two years. The move was expected but the clock is now ticking more loudly for marketers to find alternative tracking methods or maybe just do less tracking.

Adobe has announced a cloud-based version of Adobe Experience Manager, which combines a digital asset manager and Web content manager. You might have thought Adobe’s products all ran in the cloud already, but you know what thought did. (Or maybe you don’t…it’s a puzzling phrase to many.) https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2635/where-did-you-know-what-thought-did-come-from