CDP Institute

Next up: HG Data, which also tracks technology use, announced an integration with LiveRamp. This will let marketers use HG Data audience segments to target ads on Facebook, Twitter, Adobe Marketing Clouds, Salesforce DMP, and other platforms.

Streaming video service Hulu doesn’t sell technolographic data although it could probably target ads based on your TV viewing device. They’ve just launched a private ad market place to supplement their public programmatic exchange. Expect more private exchanges (where the buyers and sellers agree in advance to work together) as brands become more careful about where their ads appear.

One thing we do know is that CDPs have become more popular among B2B marketers. A big reason is the CDP is an easy place to load third party data that can in turn be fed to marketing automation and CRM systems. CDP Leadspace has just announced a deal with intent data vendor Bombora, conveniently illustrating that very point. Thanks!

If you want to improve your own CDP knowledge, we’d humbly suggest one of our half-day workshops. We’ll be running them in Brussels, Utrecht, and Munich in January. See this blog post for details and click here for a fun little video.

I doubt that 49% of companies have deployed a Customer Data Platform but the headline is too good to pass up. Many answers in this Salesforce Research survey probably came from people who have heard about CDPs but don’t fully understand them. In any event, there’s plenty of other interesting data in this 58 page study: just the thing for a cozy holiday weekend.

So far this week, you haven’t been interested in funding or acquisitions, Dear Reader. Let’s try a nice bankruptcy: Catalina, best known for supermarket cash register coupons, filed for Chapter 11 yesterday to erase $1.6 billion of its $1.9 billion debt. The pre-packaged restructuring will let the company focus on digital media and selling its vast trove of consumer data. Catalina is owned by private equity firms Berkshire Partners LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC.

Or maybe you’d like some product news. Personalization vendor Jivox now uses AI to find optimal customer journeys and create optimal messages across paid and owned channels, including social, advertising, Web, and email. To do this, it creates a unified customer view with data from all sources. But it doesn’t share this with other systems like a Customer Data Platform.

How about something completely different? Anagog lets companies deliver personalized, context-sensitive services on a mobile phone without moving personal data off the handset. The trick is an engine that runs on the device itself, tracking detailed behaviors but only exposing a summary profile and predictions to external systems.  Let that sink in: “absolutely no reliance on the cloud” is now a selling point. Can “absolutely no AI” be far behind?

Customer identity data vendor Infutor has purchased Ruf Strategic Solutions, which provides customer segment data and marketing automation. The deal caps two years of strong growth at Infutor, following a strategic investment by Norwest Venture Partners. Looks like third party data isn’t dead.

Also changing hands: Vision Integrated Graphics, which avoids the word “printer” on its Web site but produces direct mail and other real-word marketing materials for what it describes as “tech-enabled marketing solutions”. They were just acquired by private equity firm H.I.G. Capital. So some smart money thinks print has a future, too.

One more deal: Vista Equity Partners has just purchased 7Park Data, which transforms unstructured data into “contextualized Leading Performance indicators” to help investors and managers predict how businesses will perform. The focus is on financial forecasting but there are probably marketing applications.

It’s shaping up to be another slow news week, Dear Reader. But before I resort to surveys, here is some investment news that’s still fresh enough to mention. Here’s a $25 million Series B for data integration platform Workato, which automates data flows between business processes. Previous investors included Salesforce, which now owns Workato competitor Mulesoft. Salesforce didn’t participate in the latest round.