CDP Institute

And for the AI news hat trick: predictive modeling vendor Custora announced a $13.75 million Series B funding, bringing its total to $20 million. Custora builds unified customer profiles and uses the data for analytics, predictive models, and segmentation. Its clients are retailers.

Bot-based sales and marketing platform Drift announced a much smaller acquisition, of sales email response system Siftrock (no funding listed on Crunchbase, 4 employees on LinkedIn). They were more excited about a new “conversational advertising” product that seems to be an ad which points to a bot instead of a landing page. Um, okay. They also announced partnerships with Marketo, Demandbase, and Outreach.

Speaking of excited, Account-Based Marketing vendor Demandbase has a new Targeting Solution that it says “offers the scale of Google along with the precision of LinkedIn”. The big deal here is they can now target ads and Web site personalization at individuals, not just companies.

Social customer care vendor Lithium has merged with social marketing platform Spredfast. The products will be merged into a single platform, according to their announcement. Lithium is owned by Vista Equity Partners, which also owns Marketo and Cvent. Spredfast had accrued $138 million in funding per Crunchbase and 582 employees on LinkedIn; the same sources show $202 million funding and 634 employees for Lithium.

“BadTech” is shorthand for the idea that people now presume big tech companies are evil.

More BadTech: Bloomberg (again) has uncovered a “secret” deal for Mastercard to sell retail transaction data to Google so they can connect online ads to in-store purchases. Somehow the fact that it wasn’t announced is treated as extraordinarily sinister. The data seems to be properly anonymized so it’s not clear why this is any more problematic than scads of other online-to-offline tracking projects.

Again: Tuesday’s New York Times carried two stories that Facebook is used by bad people, in Libya and the U.S. What’s new isn’t the information but the implication that Facebook should change or be regulated.  That’s BadTech.

Amazon is testing an attribution pixel to measure the results of ads outside of Amazon. It’s seen as a way to compete against Google, which already provides such pixels and many suspect of biasing results in its favor. It will also give Amazon lots more data about where clients spend their money and what’s working.

Amazon, Google, and Facebook fighting over Web advertising seems so quaint when you consider the inevitable shift of commerce to the Internet of Things. Deck chairs on Titanic, generals fighting the last war, that sort of thing. Intertrust, on the other hand, provides a gateway that lets IoT device owners/users/slaves manage multiple devices and device operators access data without breaking privacy rules. Intertrust just inked a deal to work with devices from German energy company Innogy.

CMOs are also looking to a future where they get more data directly from their customers, according to the Duke Fuqua CMO Survey. Seventy percent expected to use more online customer data in the next two years compared with just 30% expecting to use more third party data. If you’re never seen this report, take a peek: it’s a 73-page trove of data on many topics. And if you want more on the future of third party data, check out this recent post on Customer Experience Matrix.

The U.S. is about to start Labor Day weekend, which is a good or bad time to discuss workers being replaced by machines. We’re talking about human copywriters, which UK-based Phrasee says it can beat 98% of the time with an AI system that ingests the performance of a year’s worth of brand copy, figures out what works, and writes email subject lines, Facebook and Instagram ads, and push messages. They just raised $4 million which they’ll use to add staff and expand in the U.S. market.

Marketing departments may need fewer employees but they still want human customers. SheerID helps to ensure they’re reaching the right people by verifying eligibility for gated offers. They do this by asking personal questions on offer forms and checking the answers against “hundreds of authoritative data sources”. Most popular segments are military, college students and teachers; they’ve just added seniors, businesses, employees, and students in more than 100 countries. Creepy, cool, or a bit of both?