CDP Institute

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.

Right on cue, small business software vendor Zoho announced tighter integration among the marketing components within its 40+ app collection. The new platform, MarketingHub, lets users run marketing campaigns spanning Zoho CRM, Campaigns, Sites, Survey, Backstage, and Social apps, in addition to connecting with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Shopify, Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, and other external systems. Lack of integration among Zoho components has been a significant pain point.

Wrapping up an atypically cheerful sequence, major advertising organizations have launched a “Privacy for America” coalition that will lobby for surprisingly reasonable of principles to improve consumer privacy protections. You can argue that they’re only trying to forestall more stringent state legislation and if you’re really cynical you can say they’re trying to hobble Facebook, Google and other data collectors. But it’s a beautiful spring day so let’s just see it as a step in the right direction.

Here’s a leftover from yesterday’s identity news: Okta, which offers enterprise identity solutions, has launched a $50 million investment fund to nurture identity and privacy innovations. Investments include Trusted Key, a blockchain-based digital identity company. Separately, Okta announced a modular Identity Engine that lets users construct custom identity experiences. Don’t get too excited: the identity engine won’t be ready until the second half of 2019.

Integrate last week announced a $34 million acquisition of Akkroo, which captures leads at in-person events. The deal fills a gap in Integrate’s ability to smooth the flow of data between marketing and sales.

Since we’re on the topic, event automation vendor Certain recently unveiled a real-time event data platform that makes it easier to react to attendee behavior by integrating event data into complex processes. The platform, called Signal, has integrations with marketing automation, CRM, and other systems.

We have a trio of identity-related items for you today, Dear Reader. First, data quality vendor Validity has launched Trust Assessments, which gives clients a score for their customer data quality, comparative industry benchmarks, and recommendations for improvements. Very helpful.

Next, privacy compliance vendor TrustArc has extended its platform to better support compliance with the ever-growing number of privacy regulations, notably the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Enhanced features cover consumer request management, identity verification, website monitoring, ad compliance, cookie consent, and marketing consent and compliance reporting.

Finally, identity verification vendor Onfido has raised $50 million in new funding from Salesforce Ventures among others. Total raise is now $100 million. Onfido verifies consumer identities remotely by comparing a video selfie against a photo of a government identity document. It uses AI to ensure the document is authentic and that the person in the selfie matches the photo ID.

IBM is selling its marketing and commerce software business to private investment firm Centerbridge Partners. Centerbridge intends to form a standalone company from the assets. It’s Centerbridge’s first big martech investment and the end of a long history of marketing software at IBM.