CDP Institute

Marketing measurement specialist Marketing Evolution has closed a $26.1 million funding round, bringing total funding to $50.7 million. Marketing Evolution assembles customer and campaign data to estimate marketing program results and recommend optimal budget allocations.

Sticking with business news, identity management vendor Okta has acquired workflow vendor Azuqua. TechCrunch reported the price at $52.5 million. Azuqua will make it easier for Okta clients to build applications that span systems without requiring employees and customers to log in more than once.

Fewer than twenty of the hundred-plus firms calling themselves CDPs are worthy of the name, according to a report from Winterberry Group. Alas, they don’t say which twenty. They do criticize CDP Institute positions without having spoken to us. And they “don’t see a long-term opportunity for a standalone CDP”.  See this blog post for the Institute’s reply.

A perceptive piece in MarketingLand argues that digital technology is making out-of-home advertising into several hot new channels. They may be on to something: Perceptin, which mostly does visual perception systems for self-driving vehicles, is capturing consumer reactions to advertisements and products in the real world. Specifically, a tiny camera on a vending machine reports customers’ age, gender, emotions, and other characteristics. No personal identities are attached.

One exciting possibility for out of home ads is to combine them with augmented reality experiences. Geon Network, which has more than 1.5 million AR objects in place worldwide, rewards consumers for spending time at real-world locations. They just announced a partnership with XYO, which captures consumer locations and provides a cryptocurrency for payments.

We have a cluster of in-store marketing items today. UPshow lets places like bars, health clubs and restaurants push ads and interactive content to TVs and customer smartphones. They’ve just raised a $6 million Series A.

S4M sells mobile ads priced on incremental store visits, calculated with a mobile tracking app that compares behaviors of consumers exposed to an ad with those who were not exposed. They’ve just launched a new format that features proximity-based push notifications.

Finally, India-based Affle has purchased Singapore-based Shoffr, which exposes retail inventories to mobile apps or Web sites. Affle sells a customer engagement platform used mostly to serve mobile ads.

We’ve been starved for news this week but here’s a juicy funding announcement: $32 million to content marketing platform vendor Percolate. The deal brings Percolate’s total funding to $106 million.

While we’re on the topic, content development platform Contentful also has an announcement: an “authoring hub” to create content that can be shared across all digital platforms. One CMS to rule them all, you might say.

Percolate and Contentful both streamline the mechanics of content creation, but StoryFit just raised $1.75 million to shape the stories themselves. Near as I can tell, the AI-based system acts as a sort of anti-creative director, suggesting changes to script and book ideas that would make them more like past stories that were popular. Sadly, they failed to name it robo-hack.

Like personalization, artificial intelligence works best when it gives customers what they want. They don’t always want chatbots but that hasn’t stopped companies from eagerly deploying them to save money. In fact, automated customer service will be the largest AI market in 2019, at $4.5 billion worldwide, according to this IDC report. Sales process recommendation and automation is tied with automated threat intelligence for second place at $2.7 billion. IDC places the total market at $35.8 billion.