CDP Institute

The Apache Unomi CDP standard doesn’t just exist: it has been named a Top Level Project, meaning its community has demonstrated an acceptable level of governance and now gets its own Project Management Committee. Unomi functions include visitor profile management, privacy management, segmentation, user/event/goal tracking, reporting, personas, A/B testing, and more.

Contentstack is a cross-channel content management system, not a CDP. But it does rely on unified customer data for personalization. In fact, it just launched prebuilt integrations for major AI platforms including Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce that draw on that data. It’s an interesting illustration of how much easier integration has become in recent years – which in turn shows the reduced grip that unified product suites like Salesforce have on their clients.

ClickDimensions, which offers a marketing automation add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365, has just purchased marketing dashboard vendor Sweetspot. There’s a certain CDP-ish ring to the deal, since SweetSpot assembles data from multiple sources (including “almost 50 prebuilt connectors”) and makes it available for analysis. But, no, this doesn’t make ClickDimensions a CDP.

Criticism of Facebook and Google hasn’t stopped advertisers from doing business with them. eMarketer estimates the duopoly’s share of U.S. digital advertising grew in 2018 to 60.1%. eMarketer does expect their share to drop to 59.3% in 2019, but only because Amazon will grow by two points to reach 8.8% of the market. In other words, everyone else will actually lose ground to the big two and a half.

The continued dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon put many companies at their mercy. One solution is to lock in repeat sales via subscriptions. So it’s probably good news that Zuora’s latest Subscription Economy Index found that subscription sales grew five times faster than total retail sales over the past seven years. Take a look for information on churn rates, results by industry, and more.

CDP Arm Treasure Data has added features to make it easier for marketers to access the data it assembles, including a new Audience Studio to built segments, run predictive analytics, and activate customer lists. Other new features include policy-based permissions, new integrations including Box and Snowflake, and a European data center.

Sentient Technology Holdings has spun off Sentient Ascend, an AI-based Web experience optimization system, which will now be Evolv Technology Solutions. Evolv has also raised $10 million. There are several Evolv’s in the industry but this one, based in San Francisco, is essentially the former Ascend team.

Most industry observers expected the California Consumer Privacy Act to be substantially weakened before it took effect in January 2020. That still may happen. But if that doesn’t, many firms may be in trouble: just 14% are currently complaint although 84% have begun the process, according to a survey from TrustArc.. One relevant benchmark: only 26% are now GDPR compliant, nearly one year after GDPR went into effect.

Viewability issues with online advertising get all the (bad) attention but viewability is equally problematic in television, according to a study by IPG Media Lab. Just 71% of TV ads were viewable – in the sense of having humans in the room watching – which is barely different from the 69% of online ads that were viewable due to fraud and other problems.

Fraud prevention firm Pixalate took a closer look at digital ad fraud and found 21% of online ads were fraudulent in the fourth quarter of 2018. This was 17% higher the previous quarter, which Pixalate attributed to higher ad volumes make it easier for fraud to slip by undetected. One piece of good news: Websites using ads.txt to verify placements had 23% less invalid traffic than sites that did not.

Business intelligence vendor Domo has continued its extension beyond reporting with Campaigns, which can generate real-time event-triggered email marketing messages. Domo says that Campaigns can replace marketing automation for most types of email campaigns. Other marketing applications will follow.

Oracle is improving integration between components of its marketing cloud. Announcements at its Modern Customer Experience conference include new integrations of Eloqua marketing automation with Infinity Web analytics, Data Cloud audience management and Data Fox compiled data; integration of Responsys email with Web personalization, and real-time triggers in Infinity.