CDP Institute

Customer service platform Kustomer – is which NOT run by Krusty the Clown – announced its own Series C, a respectable $35 million, brining its total to $73.5 million. Kustomer says that its “first-of-its-kind data model and one, single timeline view of customer interactions and events” distinguishes it from other customer service products. A unified customer view: how kool is that?

Apparently today’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter C, since our final item is the acquisition by Cision of TrendKite. Cision is a press release service with ambitions: TrendKite analyzes the impact of corporate communications and Cision bought social media platform Falcon.io earlier this month.

Positive stories about Facebook are rare these days, so it’s news that we have one: Facebook has expanded its Marketing Partner certification program to include Brand Safety products, which help advertisers avoid placements on sites they want to avoid. The first two partners are DoubleVerify, which verifies traffic quality, and OpenSlate, which rates site content.

Alas, we have more typically negative news about Google. They’ve announced an API change that would prevent most ad blockers from working in their Chrome browser. The change would also disable many antivirus, parental control, and privacy-enhancing services. Yikes! Google might change its plan in response to industry complaints.

Speaking of ad blockers, creative portfolio Website Visual Objects found they’re twice as common on desktop than mobile devices and that video ads are the most annoying of all. The study quotes Statista research showing nearly one-third of computers use some form of blocker and the usage continues to grow.

Salesforce still doesn’t call its Datorama acquisition a Customer Data Platform, but they’re continuing to evolve it in CDP-like directions. Latest steps include expanded options to build custom integrations, tighter integration with Salesforce’s own systems, and custom triggers to let other systems act on Datorama results. The focus is still on campaign-level data, not individual customers. But AdExchanger reports that connectors to CRM and other first-party sources are in the works, pulling Datorama ever closer to CDP applications.

Journey orchestration engine Thunderhead is resold by Salesforce but remains an independent company. They’ve just announced Intent Analyzer, which uses AI to analyze customer-level behaviors and find useful clusters. Thunderhead builds a unified customer database but positions itself as a digital transformation tool, not a CDP.

Jamie is still on loan to our Department of Counter-Intuitive Results. He offers news that Verizon, a telecom provider not usually associated with great customer experience, is selling a suite of customer service tools. These connect self-service and call center systems with a unified customer view and apply AI to select customer treatments. The ads just write themselves: Now you can offer your own customers that great Verizon experience!

Stream processing – which treats data as a continuous stream of events – is increasingly important to marketers and CDPs. Confluent, whose founders created the open source Apache Kafka streaming data engine, just raised a $125 million Series D, bringing their total to $206 million. It’s yet another example of open source technology in the marketing stack.

Smartphones are the source of many event streams. This study from ad agency Allen & Gerritsen takes a close look at the impact they’re had and the time they consume. Did you know that 71% of Americans sleep with or near their phone? Exciting and scary, to misquote Stephen Sondheim.

Smartphones also raise privacy issues, especially regarding location data. This study from location tech vendor Blis takes a good look at consumer attitudes. Like other studies, it finds about one-third of consumers don’t want to share their data at all and the rest are mostly will trade it for discounts or similar benefits, often at a very low price. For example: 70% would let Amazon see their shopping history on competitive sites in return for a discounted shopping cart.

As people become more used to talking to their consumer devices, will they also expect to talk to their business systems? Business intelligence vendor Qlik is betting they will, with its acquisition of conversational analytics tool CrunchBot and its parent Crunch Data. Users will be able to pose natural language questions within Qlik’s own products, within tools like Slack and Skype, and, yes, by asking Amazon Alexa.