CDP Institute

Next, we have a report that Ogury has raised $21 million in Series C funding. Ogury partners with mobile apps (Android only) to build anonymous individual-level behavioral profiles with “every app or website the user uses or visits the entire day on their mobile device.” Somehow I doubt the consent language is worded quite so directly. Ogury then targets recommendation-style ads based on the profiles. The $21 million was actually raised last year but just announced, and it’s not news until someone learns about it, right?

You may have thought today’s theme was mobile, but it’s really partnerships. Ha! We’ll finish news that marketing management platform Aprimo and digital experience platform Episerver are working together. The alliance lets Episerver users apply of Aprimo’s digital asset management and marketing resource management functions to unify content management and campaign planning. Interestingly, Episerver and Aprimo are both owned by different private equity investors.

Google will soon make good on its promise to make Google Analytics 360 audiences available for activation in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. No mention I could find of how they connect Web visitors to email addresses. Either they don’t want to remind us they often lack that data or they don’t want to remind us they always have it.

Facebook also knows more than it sometimes admits. Apparently, this includes how to do your job as a marketer: they’ve announced that advertisers will no longer be able to set budgets for individual ads within a campaign. Instead, Facebook will automatically allocate your funds to the most profitable ads. Whether that’s most profitable for you or for Facebook isn’t clear. But, hey, it’s Facebook – why wouldn’t you trust them?

When California passed a strong Consumer Privacy Act last year, many expected it would be watered down before taking effect in 2020. So far that hasn’t happened and, with the deadline fast approaching, it seemed the law might keep its teeth. Or not: it turns out that California is still working on regulations to implement the law and, sure enough, the Association of National Advertisers and other groups are lobbying hard to limit its impact. We’ll see if public concerns about privacy can overcome industry pressure. Anybody taking bets?

Customer success system vendor Gainsight has added a platform to support product managers. Features include product analytics, customer feedback reporting, personalized experiences, and key performance indicators. Gainsight calls its system a Product Experience Platform, which would yield the cheerful acronym of PEP.

Databricks doesn’t have a snappy acronym but they’ve eased the pain with a $250 million Series E to further grow their data analytics business. Databricks is a primary contributor to the open source Apache Spark analytics engine. Its revenue, now over $100 million, comes from a Spark-based Unified Analytics platform that simplifies preparation of analytical data and creation of machine learning models. They are not as customer-focused as a CDP but there’s surely some overlap.

Speaking of unrelated, Digiday reports that online furniture retailer Wayfair is emulating Amazon by selling product ads on its site. But while Amazon had nearly $2.5 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2018, Wayfair had under $13 million.

Maybe it’s the cold weather. Maybe it’s the approach of Valentines Day. Whatever the reason, compatible firms are hooking up at an alarming rate. First, B2B data compiler DiscoverOrg announced it is buying fellow compiler ZoomInfo. The B2B data space is getting crowded as firms like Radius, DemandBase and LeadSpace compete with traditional providers. You may also recall that Dun & Bradstreet was sold to private investors last August.

Next, adtech vendor Taptica has purchased adtech vendor RhythmOne. Both firms have a strong presence in connected TV advertising. Adtech is another crowded field undergoing consolidation.

Finally, email data company TowerData is buying Xverify, which validates email addresses. The combined firm will check that email addresses are valid and enhance email addresses with demographic, household and purchase intent data.

Sometimes you need data to prove the value of doing the right thing. CDP Institute is here to help. Trying to attach a price to good privacy practices? Cisco found that fewer GDPR-complaint companies had a recent data breach than non-compliant companies. Less comforting: the breach rate at compliant firms was 74%.