CDP Institute

Finally, marketing agency network Dentsu Aegis has found that CMOs rate individual-level targeting ahead of AI, digital technology, and new customer segments as their biggest strategic opportunity. Music to CDP ears: 57% are expanding use of existing (first party) customer data compared with just 37% expanding use of purchased data. Sadder tunes: CMOs number one fear is a data breach (29%) and 60% think GDPR will make it harder to build direct customer relationships. La la la.

CDP vendor Lexer is making Experian’s 230 million-person ConsumerView U.S. database available within its system. Lexer clients will be able to enhance existing records with ConsumerView demographic, financial, lifestyle, and event data, to select prospect lists, and to send messages through email, online, mobile, and connected TVs. Lexer says the arrangement is an industry first.

Computer chip design firm Arm Ltd officially announced it is buying CDP Treasure Data. We reported this on Tuesday but now it’s clear that Treasure Data will continue to sell its CDP to marketers, even as Arm uses Treasure Data technology as part of its initiative to manage Internet of Things data. See this blog post for further analysis.

This is a complicated item: Cloudera (data science platform), Qlik (business intelligence), and Trifacta (data wrangling) have been combined by business analytics vendor Bardess to create a packaged data management solution sold on the Microsoft Azure marketplace. It’s called Customer 360 Powered by Zero2Hero, a name that doesn’t explain much but does hint that customer data unification is part of the deal. Expect more examples of general-purpose data management technology acting as a CDP.

Restaurant and retail CRM specialist Bridg has launched a Customer Data Platform that ingests data from external and internal sources, matches transactions to customer profiles, sends segment to delivery systems, and lets other systems access the data through APIs. Yup, that’s a real CDP. Whether it’s “the first CDP for brick-and-mortar retailers” is debatable but does it really matter?

Swrve, which started as a mobile marketing automation system for game developers, has launched Swrve 3.0, which includes multi-channel campaign workflows, AI-based predictive models, and real time event-based triggers. Especially interesting is that triggers can be based on details within an event – for example, not just “booked a flight” but “booked a LAX/JFK flight with a window seat”. Swvre pulls in data from many sources, builds a unified database, and sends messages through external applications. We don’t list them as a CDP but they probably qualify.

Sticking with product news, telecom-focused customer engagement vendor Flytxt has launched Robo-X, an AI assistant that offers marketers advice about marketing opportunities. AI advisors for marketers are becoming quite common. Flytxt is another system that we don’t list as a CDP but probably could.

Marketers frustrated with social media can increasingly turn to video for targeted audiences. Here’s news that Adobe is integrating LiveRamp’s IdentityLink for Television within its Advertising Cloud and Audience Manager, enabling marketers to target the same audiences across addressable TV and Web display ads. One step closer to omnichannel Nirvana.

Adtech company RhythmOne isn’t targeting individuals but can measure audience demographics in its network of “TV-like” experiences on mobile apps, Web sites, and connected devices. Its latest offer is guaranteed delivery to specified audience demographics, verified against comScore’s cross-platform measurement. Apologies for the jargon but if this is important to you, it will make sense.

Speaking of jargon, programmatic video vendor Cedato has launched a “contextual lookalike targeting technology” that uses data from 400 billion video transactions to pick placements that best meet specific goals such as completion rates or engagement. What’s interesting is they’re positioning this as a way to overcome GDPR limits on user-based targeting. Expect more products pitched as a GDPR-antidote.

CDP Treasure Data is set to be bought by chip designer ARM Holdings for around $600 million, according to an unconfirmed Bloomberg report. It’s part of ARM’s strategy for Internet of Things. Treasure Data is especially good at dealing with large streams of semi-structured data, such as IoT devices produce. ARM, a SoftBank subsidiary, licenses semi-conductor chip designs and related intellectual property to semi-conductor manufacturers. Presumably that’s who they expect will use Treasure Data.

Here’s a more conventional acquisition: marketing services and technology company Cheetah Digital has purchased Stellar Loyalty, which offers a range of loyalty and engagement applications for retail, restaurant, travel, and other industries. Cheetah’s discussion of the deal touts Stellar’s “big data architecture” as a highly scalable and flexible system that creates real time customer profiles. This is apparently an improvement over Cheetah’s existing technology.