CDP Institute

Speaking of CDPs, RedPoint Global has announced a “Digital Acquisition Platform” that combines its core CDP database, real-time decisions, and DMP features to simplify ad placement, targeting, and measurement. Data flows seamlessly (of course) from RedPoint to ad platforms and back again. It’s another example of CDP vendors expanding into delivery functions.

More on advertising: IBM has launched Watson Ads Builder, which uses AI to help marketers build ads that engage in chatbot-style conversations. AI to build AI.  Wondrously meta.

We have a flurry of attribution news today, for some unknown reason. Oh, the irony. We’ll start with a $9.2 million Series A funding from AnyRoad, which measures the impact of offline experiences by collecting data from CRM, loyalty, ERP, and POS systems. They call dibs on Experience Relationship Management as a category.PR

Back online, podcast analytics and hosting platform Backtracks has raised a $2.1 million seed round. Backtracks says it captures “unprecedented detailed audience data including who, what, when, where, and how they’re listening to a podcast.” They’re reporting the details of listener behavior, not listener identities or podcast content.

Nothing is murkier than influencer marketing. Klear, an influencer marketing platform, says it can fix this with a newly-announced feature to estimate campaign ROI by calculating Earned Media Value – that is, the how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage in paid media (a.k.a. advertising). Not everyone agrees that EMV is a valid approach.

Confirming weeks of industry rumors, Amazon has announced it is buying bankrupt ad server Sizmek. The deal will help grow Amazon’s already-burgeoning ad business, in addition to giving it new source of consumer data. Advertisers wanting to keep outside of Google’s walled garden may not be thrilled to jump into Amazon’s but presumably it’s better than losing Sizmek altogether. Read AdExchanger’s detailed analysis.

Here’s another adtech sale to a data gobbling giant: advertising audience building platform TruSignal was purchased last month by TransUnion. TruSignal builds a cross-channel identity graph but is known mostly for using predictive scoring to build audiences and optimize programmatic ad bids. TransUnion was building detailed consumer profiles before it was cool.

Apple gathers plenty of consumer data but is more stingy about sharing it. They’re extending their privacy story with an iPhone option that hides users’ email addresses from app developers. You have to sign in using your Apple ID but Apple promises they won’t use that to profile users or track activity in apps. Cynics will note that Apple can do this because its business doesn’t depend on monetizing customer data. Maybe that’s the point.

Then there’s this: Salesforce has decided to not sell its software to retailers who sell certain types of weapons. The move seems to be aimed mostly at making its employees happy, since consumers don’t buy Salesforce products directly.

Location tracking vendor Foursquare has purchased location tracking vendor Placed, bulking up its data collection and expanding its online-to-offline advertising attribution capabilities. Seller was Snap, which purchased Placed two years ago. Price was not announced but apparently not much more than the $125 to $135 million that Snap paid.

More data news: healthcare data integration company Abacus Insights has raised a $12.7 million Series A. Abacus lets health insurance companies unify customer data from different sources. You can think of it as a specialized CDP for health data, although they don’t use the term.

Customer Data Platforms are the top investment priority for e-commerce marketers, with 65% planning to increase spend in 2019. This from a study by Oracle and the CommerceNext conference. Bad news is that unified customer data is also the most disappointing of 2018 investments, with 52% saying results fell below expectations. Personalization and omni-channel marketing were almost as disappointing, at 51% and 47%. This stuff is hard.