CDP Institute

CDPs are still a small drop in the martech industry bucket, which consultancies BDO and WARC peg at $121.5 billion in a new report. Lots of interesting detail here, including 26% growth rate vs 2018, faster growth in Europe and APAC than North America, and decline in single vendor stacks from 29% to 22%.

One factor driving martech growth has been the ability for marketers to buy systems with little corporate IT support. This study from Entrust Datacard found that even IT professionals recognize that letting users pick their own tools can provide a competitive advantage. Their preferred solution is to make IT more responsive rather than giving up control entirely.

We have a full plate of industry news for you today, Dear Reader. CDP CleverTap has raised a $35 million Series C, bringing their total funding to $76 million. CleverTap positions itself as an “AI-powered customer lifecycle and user retention platform” with a focus on mobile users. Waxing less poetic, we would put it our “campaign CDP” category.

Ascent360, another campaign CDP, hasn’t raised any new money but does have some new features and a new user interface including an improved performance dashboard. Being even more straightforward than we are, Ascent360 describes itself as a “CDP for mid-market business-to-consumer companies”.

Infutor isn’t a CDP but its consumer identity management solutions support a key CDP requirement. They’ve just launched a Digital Solutions Suite that links privacy-safe digital identities, such as hashed email addresses and mobile ad IDs, with offline attributes. This lets marketers use individual-level data for programmatic ad bidding, onboarding, segmentation, and personalized messaging without exposing personal identifiers.

More than half (62%) of U.S. retailers have more than 50 systems holding consumer data, according to this Deloitte study. Yikes! Less surprising: just 22% have integrated data privacy plans with business strategy. Not surprising at all: 86% of consumers believe they should be able to opt out of sales of their data while 47% feel they have little to no control over it. Or should we be surprised it’s just 47%?

Most consumers probably have no clue that their smart TV is collecting data on them. But Tru Optik, which runs a Data Management Platform for connected TV ads, is trying to get ahead of that issue with an integrated opt-out service called Privacy.TV. Opt-outs are shared across Tru Optik’s 80 million household graph, meaning consumers can opt out for all devices in their household at once. The new offering will reach beta by the end of 2019 and roll out in 2020.

Consumers who really care about privacy can already use the Brave browser, which lets them opt in to receive ads and then direct the payment to Web sites they visit. Less altruistic users can now direct the payments to their own account through Brave’s new alliance with digital money platform Uphold. Receiving the payments does require giving up their anonymity, which isn’t otherwise required with Brave.

Salesforce quietly raised $666 million in equity last week, according to SEC papers noticed by Owler. No word from the company on what they’ll do with it.

Cloud commerce platform Kibo has bought personalization vendor Monetate, complementing its acquisition of Certona in February. Kibo was formed in 2015 by Vista Equity Partners by combining several other commerce systems.

B2B activity intelligence platform Clari announced a $60 million Series D, bringing their total raise to $135 million. On most days that would seem impressive. Today, it’s just cute.

Those “martech generalists” will be hard to find: an Economist Group study for the Digital Marketing Institute finds that it’s already harder to recruit for data and analytics skills than customer experience, strategy and planning, or anything else. The same study found that technical skills are most needed by marketing departments, rating higher than creativity, analytical thinking, or marketing itself.