CDP Institute

I could find another piece of obscure data technology news but you wouldn’t read it. Instead, here’s an especially fine survey from Econsultancy about marketing attribution, sponsored by AdRoll. It’s your chance to wallow in glorious details about uptake, methods, goals, benefits, challenges, channels, effectiveness, regional differences, and more. Just in time for the weekend!

Here’s an alliance between data vendors. Time Inc.-owned Viant, which has an advertising audience database of 1.2 billion registered users, is adding information from retail data aggregator IRI. Marketers will get a clearer picture of advertising results at fine levels of detail, although not tied to identified individuals.

Back to the news. Social media management vendor Sprout Social announced they’re acquiring social analytics vendor Simply Measured. Unlike most of the martech space, social media technology is seeing a fair amount of vendor consolidation.

Over on the ecommerce side, we have a strategic global partnership between ecommerce platform Elastic Path and BloomReach, which offers semantic AI-based recommendations and Web content management.  The alliance is positioned as helping marketers who want to use best-of-breed products, so you can think of it as an alternative to consolidation.  No details on what, if anything, the vendors will do to make their systems work together.

The Yiddish term “chutzpah” has been defined as someone who murders his parents and then asks for mercy because he’s an orphan.

Google-owned YouTube has its own brand safety issues.

There’s probably a Yiddish proverb about every cloud having a silver lining, but I don’t know it. In the meantime, ad buying platform Amobee is treating brand safety and fraud prevention as promotable features. Amobee scans programmatic inventory from more than fifteen exchanges, filtering suspicious bids, fraudulent mobile apps, and objectionable content. Buyers get refunds if verified errors slip through.

CDP vendor NGDATA announced a $19 million Series C round, bringing total funding to $46.8 million. The company has been expanding its geographic footprint and recently added new attribution and Next Best Experience capabilities.

U.S. firms will spend more than $10 billion on third party audience data in 2017, according to a Winterberry Group study for the IAB and Data & Marketing Association (DMA). The study found another $10.1 billion will be spent on related services. The report breaks down the spending by data and service type.

We’re all about money today. Open source artificial intelligence vendor H2O.ai announced a $40 million Series C, making total investment $73.6 million. The firm provides machine learning tools for data scientists and non-technical users. It says more than 12,000 companies and 129,000 individuals have downloaded its software.

You weren’t that interested last week in many of the surveys we covered. But I’ll try again today with a few that I find exceptionally useful. First comes from RSR Research and takes a close look at customer engagement strategies and technologies for retailers. It provides lots of details and especially interesting comparison between responses of successful and not-so-successful companies. Spoiler alert: winners for on customer engagement; laggards focus on financial metrics.

This survey from Monetate limits its focus to personalization, but extends beyond retail to include financial services and travel and hospitality (with separate data for each). It also gives lots of details about technologies, marketing methods, data sources, channels, buying intentions, obstacles, and much else. Key finding: companies with formal plans and financial incentives for personalization are more likely to have rising profits than those that don’t. Also, North American marketers are significantly ahead of UK marketers in personalization deployment.