CDP Institute

Meanwhile, influencer marketing agency Whalar produced a study showing that influencer marketing is more effective than TV or social media ads. No surprise there.  What’s less obvious is their technique: “Steady State Topography”, which reads brain waves to measure emotional response.

When it comes to obvious, nothing beats news that social media is rife with fraud. But you might still be surprised that Arkose Labs found more than half of all social media logins are fraudulent as are 25% of new account applications.  It may explain last week’s non-obvious report that online and offline social conversations are not correlated.

Customer Data Platforms rank among the four trends that will transform how marketers run their technology, according to Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle report. Gartner points to confusion about the purpose of CDPs and overlap with other technologies. Fair enough. CDPs are about to enter the dreaded Trough of Disillusionment, which is expected but still not fun.

One CDP that won’t ride the Hype Cycle is B2B predictive analytics system Mintigo. They were just bought by business planning vendor Anaplan, which seems more interested in their staff than the product. The once-hot B2B predictive category is struggling: Lattice Engines was bought by Dun & Bradstreet, Radius is scrambling, and 6sense now positions itself as ABM orchestration. Blame AI tools embedded in CRM, marketing automation, and pretty much everything else.

Changing the subject a bit, Engagement Labs found that there’s literally zero correlation between online and offline conversations about companies. Their message is that both are important but must be measured separately. Good point.

Data analysis requires so much, well, analysis. BI tool ThoughtSpot removes much of the drudgery by using AI to answer user questions and answer questions users should have thought to ask. They just raised $248 million, bringing their total raise to $554 million. Someone likes this idea.

B2B CDP CaliberMind also has some nifty AI capabilities. But their news for today is about deal with data vendor DiscoverOrg. CaliberMind users will get easy access to DisoverOrg data while DiscoverOrg clients can access CaliberMind’s engagement scores, ROI reports, and attribution measures. DiscoverOrg paints it as a step towards becoming a “comprehensive data platform”, whatever that may be.

We don’t usually cover CDP marketing ploys but we’ve never seen anyone give away a CDP as conference swag. Stop by the BlueVenn booth at DMEXCO, MarTech East, or Technology for Marketing next month and you might not get a free t-shirt but you will be able to enter a drawing for a free BlueVenn implementation and one-year license. The CDP Institute will present at all three events but we promise not to enter the contest.

We have a nice little trio of acquisitions today, Dear Reader. Closest to home for marketers, customer data compiler NetWise has bought competitors WhoToo from Demandbase, which itself purchased WhoToo in 2015. NetWise is moving from a white label model to selling its services directly.

Messaging platform Airship is buying Apptimize, a testing and optimization solution for messaging, Web sites, and smart TV channels. Apptimize lets marketers change iOS and Android apps without making code changes and then measure the results. Hours of fun.

Finally, Cisco announced a deal to buy CloudCherry, which provides call center agents with journey flows and predictive analytics. The system combines data from multiple source systems in real time. Of course, it would be better to read data from a CDP than maintain yet another set of point-to-point integrations.

Syncsort has purchased Pitney Bowes’ software solutions business, a collection of tools for customer analytics, data quality, personalization, interaction management, geocoding, and more. It illustrates the interest that general data management vendors are showing in customer data. Price was $700 million.