CDP Institute

Here’s an item that’s more related to the previous one than you might think: a study from Salesforce finds that email marketing and display advertising teams collaborate on technology purchases at 74% of U.S. companies today and plan to collaborate at another 20%. The driver behind this lions-with-lambs comity is use of email addresses to feed advertising audiences to, you guessed it, Facebook. Lots of other interesting information here, including usage of data types, technology, metrics, and new ad channels such as voice devices and wearables.

We haven’t seen too many big martech acquisitions recently, but here’s one: GoDaddy is buying Main Street Hub, a company that manages social marketing for small businesses. Price is $125 million, which isn’t much of a return on the $93 million in debt and equity invested in the firm. No one has cracked the code on making money at small business marketing services. But the deal certainly gives GoDaddy something new to offer its customers.

For a broader look at martech investing, check out MarTech Advisor’s just-released Investscape report on 2017. Total funding dropped from $14 billion in 2016 to $8.8 billion in 2017 but the 2016 figures were skewed by a few very large deals. There’s no separate category for Customer Data Platforms in particular or data management in general, but it’s clear that investors’ priorities are on delivery: top funding categories were mobile marketing, e-commerce, sales enablement, loyalty, social media, and events.

If you want a really broad perspective, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a breath-taking drop in trust in U.S. institutions. Among the “informed public”, the combined trust index for government, media, business, and non-government organizations fell from 68 to 45 in the past year, moving the U.S. from one of the world’s most trusting societies to dead last. The broad social implications are horrifying so let’s ignore them to note that marketers can expect privacy and transparency to be more important to their customers.

Adobe has released a connector that lets its Adobe Campaign system read Hadoop data directly. It’s intriguing on more levels than I can discuss here. Let’s just note Adobe’s blog comment that this lets Campaign access raw Hadoop data “without complex data migrations and transformations” as if they weren’t important.

Here’s a milestone of some sort: there’s now a system specifically built to visualize compliance with data privacy rules. That would be Integrity Software, which launched in 2016 and just raised $1.5 million, bringing its total to $4.5 million. GDPR is obviously the big driver here but we can hope that data privacy is being taken more seriously in general.

Remember yesterday’s comment about industry-specific systems for customer data? Trilliant Health’s announcement of a unified data and CRM platform for hospital and health system data came too late to include. But I’m mentioning it now to reinforce the point.

One question haunting the CDP industry is what happens when enterprise tech vendors start offering data unification. It hasn’t happened so far but last week did see new connectors between Salesforce CRM data and several Google products: Google Analytics 360, the BigQuery database, Google AdWords, and DoubleClick Bid Bid Manager. They’re first fruit of a partnership announced last year. If Google builds more connectors and adds core CDP functions such as identity resolution, this could get interesting.

Another alternative to standard CDPs is industry-specific products with native connectors to operational systems. Vizergy, which offers travel Web sites that integrate with reservation systems, already loads and unifies customer data. It just launched TargetingHub to analyze that data and assign customers to segments. Vizergy also throws in 140 predefined campaign ideas to help marketers use the results.

Hungry for your daily dose of GDPR? Chew on this: SDK management vendor SafeDK found that 56% of mobile apps include at least one SDK that accesses location, which is considered private data. Many also read lists of installed apps (42%) and contacts (29%), and 10% access the microphone. The study found the average mobile app includes 18.5 SDKs. You’ll find plenty more SDK trivia to liven up that Super Bowl party.

Some have feared that audience data would become unavailable once the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect this May. But panic is now being replaced by accommodation and even some optimism that companies can turn GDPR to their advantage. As part of that process, the OpenX advertising exchange has announced its own GDPR compliance and provided a resource center to help others in the industry make the adjustment. If you’re still confused by GDPR, this is a good place to start.

Advertising audience compiler Eyeota has completed a $12.5 million in Series B funding. Eyeota manages 3.5 billion audience profiles from around the world. The company’s total funding is $20.5 million.