CDP Institute

CDP vendor Segment has raised a $175 million Series D funding, bringing its total funding to $284 million. Segment calls itself as a customer data infrastructure system, reflecting its focus on customer data management rather than analytical or personalization functions.

Sticking with CDP news, CaliberMind has added what it calls “chain based attribution” to its system. The methodology compares different customer journey paths to identify the incremental impact of each channel on results. Designed for B2B marketers, it works at the account level.

Healthcare CRM vendor Healthgrades has launched a Customer Data Platform. The system will bring together patient data from many sources to give health systems a unified customer view.

CDP vendor Optimove has a new benchmarking platform for retailers, allowing them to measure their sales and marketing performance against industry-wide aggregates. The benchmark will be powered by data collected by Optimove and will help Optimove’s Optibot system identify opportunities for improvement.

For marketers who prefer human assistance, martech services firm Ansira has purchased BrightWave, an agency specializing email and CRM services. It’s Ansira’s third acquisition in the past year.

As headlines go, “Nativo Buys SimpleReach” doesn’t quite measure up to “Headless Body in Topless Bar”. But Nativo sells content advertising and SimpleReach measures content impact, so it’s a modestly interesting sign of the growing role played by measurement.

Resorting to surveys, Ascend2 had one particularly interesting finding in its recent paper on marketing technology utilization: 67% of the respondents buy new marketing technology every quarter and an amazing 28% add new martech every month. Some people buy groceries less often.

Let’s end with some good news: Ads.txt seems to be working. Fraud intelligence company Pixalate found 19% lower fraud rates on sites using ads.txt, which helps to ensure that people selling ads for a Web site are authorized to do so. Adoption is now around 75% although it may have stalled.

CleverTap, a mobile marketing platform that also casually refers to itself as a CDP, has added a recommendation engine to its bag of tricks. This is a fully automated tool for marketers: deployment takes just minutes.

Applicaster, which helps companies build apps for mobile devices and connected TVs, has raised $20 million to grow its business. The raise brings its total funding to just over $30 million. Applicaster is more for technical users than marketers.

In the mood for some Face-bashing? You’ll have to stand in line behind the US Department of House and Urban Development, which just sued Facebook for enabling housing discrimination by letting advertisers target ads in distinctly discriminatory ways. This after Facebook removed age, gender, and Zip code targeting for housing, employment, and credit ads — after blithely permitting them for years – and even banned white nationalist and separatist content after figuring out that they are inextricably associated with hate groups. Clueless doesn’t do them justice.

TV advertising is a vastly larger market than out-of-home. It’s also getting an upgrade, in the form of increasing ability to address ads to individuals. More than half (54%) of US households now have an addressable TV, according to this report from the Video Advertising Bureau. They estimate spend will reach $3.3 billion by 2020.