CDP Institute

Connected TV means more than addressing individual consumers: it means consumers can buy things through their video device. Sure enough, this study from Telaria and Hulu shows that connected TVs are the medium of choice for buyers of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. DTC buyers spend 70% more time streaming TV than using social media and 80% of DTC shoppers think DTC brands give them a closer relationship than shopping on Amazon. Serving this market is another way that Publicis will benefit from Epsilon’s direct marketing heritage.

Ad agency giant Publicis announced a $4 billion purchase of data-driven marketing agency Epsilon from Alliance Data. The deal illustrates the transformation of mass media into addressable advertising. Attentive readers will recall that Alliance announced Epsilon was on the block last November and that Publicis-competitor IPG announced its purchase of Epsilon-competitor Acxiom for $2.3 billion last July.

Customer engagement platform CleverTap has raised a $26 million Series B, bringing total funding to $41.6 million. CleverTap started with mobile marketing but it now supports other channels and includes a CDP among its features.

Zaius positions itself as a combination CRM, email service provider, data science platform, and, of course, CDP. That wasn’t enough, so they’ve now added a “data science-powered marketing assistant” that will suggest campaign segments based on predictive models (likely to churn, likely to buy, etc.), identify under-exposed products, and probably do other clever things. They’ve named it ZAM for obvious reasons.

Walmart isn’t selling a CDP yet. But they did just buy Polymorph Labs, which will help their advertising clients to target Walmart shoppers. You did know that Walmart sells ads, right? It’s part of their “Anything Amazon Does We Can Do Better” program.

LiveRamp’s business is built on tracking consumers across platforms, so it makes sense in a fox-guarding-the-chickens sort of way for them to be in the business of preserving privacy as well. They’ve just bought Faktor, an Amsterdam-based consent management platform that will become part of their suite of privacy compliance tools.

Let’s stick with privacy. Here we have a Google-funded study that finds the usual contradiction: two-thirds of consumers said they’d share some data with a voice assistant to enhance their experience, but three-quarters are not comfortable that their device is always listening. That’s not really a contradiction, of course: consumers are willing to share so long as they control what they reveal.

This survey from ad blocking platform eyeo offers another contradiction: 80% of UK online users recognize the importance of advertising to free internet services but 81% still think it’s fair to use ad blocking software. The study reports 22% are actually using an ad blocker. While 71% of ad blocking users are trying to avoid ads, a hefty 49% aim to enhance privacy/security.

Pearl Thinks has launched a retail-oriented Customer Data Platform. Special features include visualization of customer migration across segments and ability to calculate database health and value. The system integrates with the Shopify ecommerce platform.

If you’ve been waiting for Google to enter martech, your wait is over. Google Cloud has launched a collection of retail solutions ranging from store operations to merchandising to customer acquisition and retention. Google also announced retail-related partnerships with system integrators and software firms including Bluecore, Salesforce, SAP, and Tableau.

Still more tech for retail: GoDaddy just bought Sellbrite, which lets companies place their merchandise on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Jet and Walmart.com from a single location. Listings through Sellbrite can be connected to GoDaddy’s GoCentral ecommerce Website builder to coordinate inventory and order fulfillment.

Now for some good news: integration of marketing stacks has improved sharply over the past two years, according to Walker Sands’ State of Marketing Technology 2019 report. Compared with the 2017 study, companies with an integrated best of breed stack rose from 27% to 34% and those using a single vendor suite rose from 21% to 27%. Limited piecemeal and fragmented best of breed stacks fell from 42% to 17%. Just 7% reported they have no marketing technology, compared with 17% in the earlier report.