CDP Institute

Flybits also builds a unified customer view, in its case for banks. The system mixes conventional customer data with “external contextual data” such as risk profiles, feeds the result to an AI engine, and gets back recommended customer treatments. The company just raised a $35 million Series C, brining totally funding to $50 million.

When Facebook released an open source version of its recommendation model last week, cynics saw a ploy to seem less evil. Now Uber, one of the few big tech companies with a worse reputation than Facebook, has released an open source AI tool of its own. The Uber tool which trains conversational agents by having them talk to each other, which equal parts fascinating, frightening, and bizarre.

If there’s a gold standard for inflated expectations, surely it is set by blockchain. IAB Tech Lab has just announced a program to bring some reality to the digital advertising corner of the blockchain universe by creating a mechanism for testing blockchain-based products and services. The ultimate goal is standards to guide industry-wide deployment. This is worth watching.

Technology to track TV ad views is further along than blockchain but can still seem like science fiction.. TVision Insights takes the problem literally by installing equipment in consumers’ homes that watches their eye movements to determine exactly what shows and ads they’re paying attention to. They just raised a $11.5 million series B, bringing their total to $21.3 million.

Barking up the same tree, TV ad buying and measurement vendor VideoAmp has acquired IronGrid Data Services, which provides access to “secure, anonymized, and privacy-complaint” TV viewership data from video program providers and connected TVs. VideoAmp will use this as part of a new data division that aggregates data from set-top boxes and automated content recognition to provide segmentation and viewership data.

Next, an even bigger $100 million raise for Singapore-based Near, which collects behavior, location, and transaction data on a staggering 1.6 billion users worldwide and lets clients send them targeted messages. Total funding is now $134 million. (Don’t confuse them with San Francisco-based blockchain start-up Near, which raised $12.1 million last week.)

Finally, news that in-app video advertising platform Vungle was bought by private equity investor Blackstone for a reported $750 million or more. You probably wouldn’t have read this if that number weren’t so large. I know I wouldn’t have written it.

Some days this newsletter just writes itself. First we have a nice funding announcement from a CDP: a $50 million Series C for Amperity. It brings their total raise to $78 million.

Adobe has announced that Microsoft-Accenture joint venture Avanade will build a practice to connect Adobe Experience Manager and Campaign with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure. The deal illustrates the importance of such integration and how hard it is. Adobe, Microsoft and Accenture are all partners in the Open Database Initiative but apparently have decided that direct Adobe-Microsoft integrations can’t wait for ODI to be ready.

The waiting is also over for Centerbridge Partners’ relaunch of the marketing products business it purchased from IBM in April. The new name is Acoustic, which “launches with a total focus on unleashing the brilliance in marketers by empowering them with freedom to do their best work.” I’d like to think the jargon-filled announcement is an elaborate prank, but doubt it.

Some jargonistas substitute “customer experience” for “marketing”, on the theory that one encompasses the other. But this survey for contact center vendor Serenova found otherwise: just 10% of customer experience teams report to a marketing leader. Much more common were reporting to CEO (33%) or head of operations (26%). Lots more here about CX priorities, technology, and obstacles, including that lack of a single customer view is the biggest challenge.

The Federal Trade Commission has reportedly approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over privacy violations. The deal was widely criticized as a slap on the wrist and the company’s stock price rose after the announcement. But it’s still by far the largest privacy fine ever and roughly twice the maximum 4% of revenue allowed under GDPR.