CDP Institute

CDP vendor BlueConic also has some new goodies: in its case, an AI Workbench that makes it easier to build and deploy models that take advantage of BlueConic’s customer profiles. The package includes tools to help data scientists build models more quickly and a collection of prebuilt models that marketers can use without outside help.

Just for fun, let’s write about a company that’s not a CDP (and doesn’t claim to be). TruSignal builds audiences with first party data from multiple sources and applies an identity graph to build unified profiles. Sounds CDP-ish, but TruSignal only stores audience tags, while a real CDP stores full details of customer behavior. They’ve just updated their platform with a new user interface and audience building tools.

Need evidence that mass media is increasingly addressable? Try this study from Comcast-owned FreeWheel Research reports that 40% of all ad views were delivered on a connected TV device in 2018. Half of advertisers and agencies combine the buying of digital video and linear (broadcast) TV today and 91% say they will by 2021.

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.