CDP Institute

CDP Amperity has purchased Custora, a retail predictive analytics and campaign management system. Custora also assembles customer profiles so it might have qualified as a CDP by itself. It’s a rare acquisition by a CDP vendor and extends Amperity’s scope into “campaign CDP” territory.

Integrated sales and marketing system HubSpot has purchased data synching vendor PieSync. The deal will make it easier for HubSpot to share contact data with its growing partner ecosystem. PieSync doesn’t create a persistent database so the deal doesn’t make HubSpot a CDP – although, as with Salesforce’s purchase of the MuleSoft integration platform, it may be a step in that direction.

There are two classic CDP use cases: updating retargeting lists based on subsequent behavior and showing a complete profile to call center agents. So it’s worth noting that call center vendor Sharpen Technologies has added an option to ingest, combine, and present data from all sources. Regardless of whether it qualifies as a true CDP, it shows operational vendors trying to solve a problem that CDP addresses.

Call center agents only need to see a limited set of data. An IDG study for data transformation vendor Matillion found that analytics teams at 20% of big enterprises were analyzing more than 1,000 data sources and the mean number of sources was 400. Only a report for data scientists would cite the mean, but I disgress. The press release has more information than the published report, so let’s link to that.

You’ve surely heard already that Google’s parent company Alphabet is buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, and don’t need me to point out that this is about collecting data, not selling wearable devices. So let’s instead report that panel-based customer research company UserTesting has acquired fabulously-named Truthlab, which uses AI to find highlights in video feeds. As with Fitbit, the goal is to extract useful information from people’s behaviors. It’s Zuboffian!

It seems the News Gods were too busy with their Halloween costumes to make anything happen on Thursday. So let’s roll back to Wednesday, when marketing analytics vendor TapClicks bought reporting tool builder Megalytic. Data gathered by TapClicks’ 200+ connectors will now feed Megalytic dashboards.

Wednesday also brought news that personalization vendor Folloze had raised an $11 million Series B. Folloze uses data from internal and external sources to develop and orchestrate personalized messaging for B2B marketers.

We also have a LinkedIn report that digital marketers do a poor job of measuring return on marketing investments. The main criticism is that marketers report short term metrics without waiting for long term results. They offer no particular solution beyond educating everyone to be patient.

Customer Data Platforms are supposed to be good at connecting with other systems, so it’s always a bit unclear whether a new integration is newsworthy. But let’s lead today with an integration between the Lytics CDP and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s interesting because uses Salesforce as a delivery engine for Lytics campaigns.

Switching gears, here’s a MightyHive survey about use of first party data. Several interesting results, including that the majority of companies use less than half the potential of their data, more successful companies rely heavily on agencies, consultants, and other external resources, and the biggest challenges have to do with accuracy, cost, and privacy, not technology issues. Worth a look.

And switching again, we’ll mention Twitter’s decision to ban (nearly) all paid political advertising. You’ve probably heard about the news already but it’s still worth noting as a rare victory for civilization in its war with social media. Don’t celebrate yet: Facebook is still happy to distribute paid lies.

CDP Optimove has added real-time streaming data ingestion and access, something it calls Optidata. The announcement was made at the company’s annual PostFunnel Summit. You were expecting OptiSummit, weren’t you?