CDP Institute

Finally, we have the headline “Forge.AI Raises $11M to Decode the World’s Unstructured Data” which delightfully suggests a tiny investment could achieve a huge task. Forge.AI uses natural language processing to extract structured information fro data such as news reports, social posts, and financial filings. Not exactly a new idea – which makes their claim even more charming.

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.

B2B data vendor Aberdeen has acquired intent data collector The Big Willow. Once best known for its survey-driven research reports, used primarily for lead generation, Aberdeen now positions itself as an intent data vendor. The acquisition expands the volume of intent signals that Aberdeen can marry with its contact lists.

True Influence also provides B2B sales and marketing teams with intent-based prospect lists. They just launched an improved list selection tool called OpportunityBASE. It’s great at routing prospects to sales people, with features including multiple reps per account and product line mapping for sales commission reporting.

How popular is intent data? Well, 35% of companies use it when measuring audience coverage, according to a survey for B2B data vendor DealSignal by Demand Gen Report. That compares with 87% for contact information, 45% for account characteristics, and 40% for product usage. More worrisome: only 20% use third party data to improve their information even though 60% are less than “mostly confident” that their current data is adequate.

We’ll cover funding news today because there’s not much else and everybody likes money, right? Biggest first: data analysis platform Looker raised a $103 million Series E, bringing its total to $280.5 million since 2013. You do have to wonder why a flat $100 million wasn’t enough.

On a smaller scale, text-analysis platform Luminoso announced a $10 million Series B, bringing total funding just over $30 million. Luminoso specializes in analyzing customer conversations such as call center transcripts.

Finally: MetaCX, founded by ExactTarget co-founder Sott McCorkle, has raised $14 million for a “digital success layer that brings suppliers and buyers of enterprise software together for better collaboration and outcome management, offering real-time visibility into customer success.” I don’t know what that means, either, but Forbes says it refers to a performance dashboard shared by vendors and their clients. If that seems like a lot for a dashboard company, see todays’ first item.

Privacy, fraud, and other concerns may loom but the third party data industry had a great 2018, growing by 17.5% over the previous year, according to a Winterberry Group study for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Total spending on data and solutions was nearly $19.2 billion. Data management solutions, which includes Customer Data Platforms, grew by 25% to just under $5.0 billion. Download for details.

More evidence that data-driven advertising isn’t dead: Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital is paying $150 million for MightyHive, a digital ad services company. S4 already owns digital content production company MediaMonks.

Facebook, Google, and other “walled gardens” sell advertising based on their own data without sharing it. Amazon is joining the club, switching from a search-driven marketplace to one where brands must pay to be seen. Amazon ad specialist Quartile found the change is happening quickly: the share of Thanksgiving-weekend sales driven by ads grew 54% this year over 2017, reaching 25.1% of the total. Amazon is already the third largest digital ad publisher.

We have actual CDP news today, Dear Reader. First, CDP Ascent360 announced a $4.1 million Series A investment. Ascent360 specializes in small and mid-sized clients and reports that its business doubled in 2018.