CDP Institute

If you need a reminder that surveys aren’t always accurate: a report in The Information says that internal Amazon documents show only 2% of smart speaker owners actually made a purchase with them so far in 2018. Surveys based on self-reported consumer behavior have put the rate above 50% or even 70%.

Business data giant Dun & Bradstreet has agreed to be acquired by a private investor group in a deal valued at $6.9 billion. The company had announced in February that it was considering options for value creation. D&B has shown little growth in recent years despite the broad surge in data-driven B2B marketing.

Plucky little Sigstr is also in the B2B data business, with a clever technology that gathers data from email signatures. It has just launched Pulse, which analyzes a company’s email, calendar, and CRM data to assess sales relationships with target accounts. It’s a bit creepy but I guess there’s no expectation of privacy where business emails are involved.

Ecommerce personalization vendor Dynamic Yield has raised a $32 million Series D funding round, bringing its total funding to $77 million. The company will use the funds to extend beyond Web site personalization to other channels including kiosks, call centers, point of sale systems, and IoT devices.

Tapad has integrated its identity graph with Adobe Audience Manager, expanding the reach of Audience Manager by adding new device connections. Originally a cross-device matching vendor, Tapad has recently added full data ingestion capabilities which qualify it as a CDP.

More identity-based targeting: LiveRamp has added Versium’s business data and predictive models to its IdentityLink Data Store. Versium will support a new B2B Data Management Platform that lets marketers target online advertising based on their own offline data. Versium collects business and consumer data and applies predictive analytics to create custom audiences.

Tru Optik also does device-based targeting, although not to identified individuals. It has just partnered with Triton Digital, which supports online audio publishing and advertising, to help target ads to streaming radio and podcast audiences. Podcasts are hot – including this one featuring CDP Institute’s own David Raab among others.

A more credible survey, by Frost & Sullivan for CA Technologies, actually suggests that consumers underestimate how widely their data is shared: 83% of financial services companies and 74% of healthcare executives reported their company shares personal consumer data, while only 48% of consumers think this this happens.

If you still need a reason to worry about privacy, try this: Trump Administration is working on the issue. True to form, they’ve consulted with businesses that gather data, including Facebook, Alphabet and Comcast, but no consumer advocates. Presumably the plan is to preempt strong state legislation with a weaker federal law.

Here’s a scary statistic: 66% of Americans think their Internet Service Provider is selling their behavioral data to advertisers. Three-quarters think the government has access to it. I’m pretty sure neither statement is correct, so this shows a truly frightening combination of ignorance and paranoia blocking a reasoned discussion on these topics. The data comes from Open Garden, which is working on a bandwidth sharing alternative to conventional ISPs.

Just some random items today. Let’s start with news that CDP AgilOne has launched an integration with display ad targeting vendor Criteo. AgilOne users will be able to send lists to Criteo to send Web display ad campaigns.

Next, news that data access vendor Dremio has raised a $30 million Series B. Dremio lets analytical systems issue SQL queries to SQL and NoSQL source data without moving it into a separate CDP-style database. It’s important to recognize that many solutions overlap to some degree with CDP capabilities and to understand how they differ.