CDP Institute

Stockholm-based Funnel also promises to empower business users, although they more modestly limit themselves to feeding data from 400+ marketing and advertising sources into reporting systems. The company has just raised its own $8 million, bringing the total to $21 million.

Not everyone is jumping on the build-it-yourself bandwagon. Digital marketing platform Maropost has added e-commerce capabilities to create a unified marketing and commerce package. The company says its system is “the first platform to offer a 360-degree view into a customer’s touchpoints, communications and purchase history”. But I’m pretty sure that’s been done before.

Remember when being “mobile first” seemed so important? That is so 2018. Connected TV (CTV) devices are now where it’s at, according to ad asset management vendor Extreme Reach. Their latest report shows that CTV served more video ad impressions (44%) than mobile devices (30%) in the final quarter of 2018. The mobile share actually peaked in Q4 2017 at 39%, when the CTV share was just 16%.

Nielsen is also excited about connected TV: they’ve just bought Sorenson Media, which helps to deliver addressable TV ads. Sorenson will join Nielsen acquisitions including Gracenote (automatic content recognition, which reports what’s viewers are watching) and Qterics (smart TV software and privacy management). They’ll all be part of an “Advanced Video Advertising” group whose mission is to provide tech to deliver ads, not just measure them.

But don’t abandon mobile just yet. When you take non-video ads into account, it’s still king: eMarketer reports mobile will account for $87 billion in U.S. media spend this year. That’s two-thirds of all digital advertising and just over one-third of the entire total ($238 billion). eMarketer pegs non-digital TV at just $71 billion.

It’s always a good day when we have actual CDP news for you, Dear Reader. Here’s some now: Lytics has raised a $35 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $58 million. The money will be used to grow product development, sales, and marketing. Huzzah.

More CDP news: mParticle has enhanced its audience management features. Lifetime Audiences lets marketers use data older than 90 days to build audience lists. User Attribute Forwarding lets exported audiences include attributes beyond customer identifiers. mParticle can also create real-time audiences with its AudienceSync feature.

Marketing Evolution combines data from multiple sources, but it’s not a CDP because it works at the campaign rather than customer level. One thing they share with CDPs is a need for quality inputs. So it’s relevant that they’ve just added automated features to assess and validate quality as new data is loaded into the system.

Attribution geeks, your day has come. We have three items on the topic. First: mobile attribution specialist AppsFlyer has added a suite of “people-based attribution” products which expand beyond mobile to “provide one holistic view of the customer journey across multiple touchpoints, connected devices, digital platforms, and media channels.”

Next, marketing measurement vendor Singular has announced “the first-ever cross-platform and cross-device ROI analytics solution”. It combines marketing spend data with customer behaviors gathered by its own SDKs and external systems to give ROI by campaign, publisher, creative, customer cohorts, and, yes, individual users.

Finally, connected device data vendor Kochava has expanded its ability to connect on mobile Web and in-app ad consumption on the same device, using deterministic rather than probabilistic methods. It’s not clear exactly what’s new but they seem very excited.

Lots of interesting news today, Dear Reader.