CDP Institute

As always, IT departments have a different view. Syncsort asked about business initiatives supported by IT and found the most common are efficiency at 48% and improved customer experience at 46%. Marketing and sales came in at 13%, handily beating out Other at 4%. Also interesting: just 19% were feeding Web/mobile/social data into their enterprise data lake. This is why marketing departments get their own CDP.

In somewhat harder news, LiveRamp has launched Authenticated Traffic Solution, which lets Web publishers match visitor data with its IdentityLink profiles. This enables cookieless customer identification across channels. It’s all very noble, according to CEO Scott Howe. “We’re launching our Authenticated Traffic Solution for the good of everyone in the industry—so that permissions can be honored while also democratizing identity and data for the good of all participants.”

Salesforce has introduced a “the first low-code blockchain platform for CRM”, a claim that’s narrow enough to be true. Open source Hyperledger Sawtooth technology lets Salesforce users can create blockchain objects the same way they’d create other custom objects and share them across networks in workflows and apps. Lots of practical potential. The platform will be generally available in 2020.

More blockchain: Facebook is reportedly planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in 2020. The company has not been shy about its desire to add commerce and financial services in case privacy rules crimp its current business. It’s a perfect match: blockchain works without trust and nobody trusts Facebook.

Apple doesn’t make its money from customer data, so it can more easily take the privacy high road. They’ve announced changes to their Safari Web browser that will let advertisers capture ad clicks for campaign measurement without tying the clicks to identifiable individuals. It will limit first-party as well as third-party data, so if you’re a marketer, you’re likely to be affected.

A day for odd acquisitions. LinkedIn announced it is buying cross-channel identity platform Drawbridge, which provides both linkages and customer data. Drawbridge will become part of LinkedIn’s marketing solutions platform. Look at it this way: targeting based on LinkedIn’s deep profiles will now reach people across more channels.

If you thought LinkedIn and Drawbridge made an odd couple, try this: accounting systems company Intuit and marketing data analytics vendor Origami Logic. According to Intuit, the appeal was that Origami Logic’s “strong data architecture” is “capable of collecting data from a variety of sources and generating insights quickly and efficiently.”

Finally, Upland Software just bought B2B content curation platform Kapost. Price was $50 million on $15 million revenue. You may recall that Upland bought email automation vendor PostUp at a similar ratio just last month. It’s what they do.

Salesforce is expanding its AppExchange to include a marketplace for apps that connect with its Datorama marketing analytics system. The list of “available and upcoming” apps includes connectors to Salesforce Marketing Cloud email, Sales cloud lead generation campaigns, AppNexus ad campaigns, and several types of reporting.

Customer success vendor Gainsight has launched a Customer Data Platform of its own, part of a new Customer Cloud for subscription businesses. The new CDP pulls in data from many sources, lets users define what’s stored, and shares data with a variety of external systems. We haven’t seen the details but it sounds like a real CDP.

Selligent, a B2C marketing execution platform, doesn’t claim to have a CDP but does offer what they carefully call “CDP capabilities”. They seem to mean that they build multi-source customer profiles but use them within the Selligent platform. They’ve just added a customer information management tool that helps brands comply with privacy regulations. GDPR features are in place and CCPA is on the way.

What’s changed since the General Data Protection Regulation took effect one year ago tomorrow?  TrustArc and Ipsos found that 36% of UK consumers have greater trust in how their data is handled, which the press as spun variously as a success (“more than one third”) or failure (“only 36%”). I’d say any improvement in trust is a success these days. A global survey from Snow Software had similar results: 39% of data professionals feel more protected although 20% feel worse.