CDP Institute

In a surprising privacy victory – and let’s face it, any privacy victory is surprising – the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies need a warrant to obtain cell phone location history data from wireless carriers. But don’t get too excited: the ruling doesn’t address other surveillance issues such as real-time location tracking or video cameras in public places, or commercial use of location data.

Mobile marketing vendor Urban Airship has raised a $25 million Series F, bringing its total financing to $100.9 million. Urban Airship orchestrates and personalizes messages across mobile apps, email, Web push, and SMS and connects with other channels via an open API.

Digital audience vendor Viant can now retarget smart TV ads to viewers’ mobile devices in real time. In other words, you might get an ad on your smartphone, laptop, or computer based on an ad you just saw on TV. It’s a technical triumph requiring integration of Viant’s cross-device identity data with equipment manufacturers, automatic content recognition services, TV ad providers, and ad exchanges. Whether consumers will be impressed or creeped out is another question.

For delivering ads you might not want, Adobe has a technical triumph of its own: it has teamed up with online audio distributor TuneIn to serve ads on smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Chosen format is 90 second ads delivered twice an hour. The company says that targeting “at launch” is based on the type of content, perhaps implying that individual-level targeting will follow.

Email vendor Campaign Monitor has merged with email vendors Emma and Delivra. Each will be sold separately under the Campaign Monitor umbrella. Campaign Monitor and Emma serve mostly small businesses while Delivra serves more advanced marketers. You may recall that Campaign Monitor purchased the Tagga customer data platform back in March 2017.

Mobile marketing platform Leanplum has purchased AI-powered chatbot company Connecto. The acquisition will give Leanplum capabilities for real-time one-on-one interactions through voice and other channels. Connecto is Bulgarian; don’t confuse them with the India-based Connecto acquired by GirnarSoft in 2016.

A CDP is in place at nearly half (45%) of marketers surveyed by Forbes Insights for CDP vendor Treasure Data. One third (35%) of those with a CDP have seen some benefits already and 93% expect benefits within two years. The fraction seeing significant benefits is expected to grow from 1% now to 40% over that period. Download for lots of other good data about data sources, obstacles, and applications.

Personalization vendor RichRelevance has launched its next generation of AI-based personalization tools. Key features include dynamic assembly of individual experiences, real-time performance tracking and continuous optimization. A helpful “Experience Browser” overlays the client’s Web site to display data, rules, and results for each decision in context. Marketers can set business rules to constrain the AI decisions and data scientists can draw on system data to define custom personalization strategies.

Compared with AI-based personalization, automated data management gets relatively little attention, at least in martech circles. But its potential for solving the data unification problem is huge. Immuta, which marshals sensitive data for machine learning projects, just raised a $20 million Series B. And Crate.io, an open source SQL database to manage feeds from machines and IoT devices, raised an $11 million Series A. Now you know.

I have a slew of other items about AI being used for cool things including seeing around corners https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/12/researchers-develop-ai-for-detecting-objects-behind-walls-with-a-single-photo/, rendering 3D objects from photos https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/14/googles-deepmind-develops-ai-that-can-render-3d-objects-from-2d-pictures/, and delivering packages via two-legged robots (creepy!) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/agility-robotics-building-two-legged-cassie-robot-and-delivery-robots.html.

Just in case you had doubts that Google is serious about competing with Amazon in retail, consider this: Google just invested $550 million in Chinese e-commerce merchant JD.com. Google doesn’t do much business in China so this is about expanding in other markets and listing JD.com as a seller in Google Shopping. Google also announced several enhancements last week that help retailers display their inventory on-line and drive traffic to local stores. See this from The Street for more thoughts on the JD.com deal.

Adobe has expanded its attribution capabilities with Attribution IQ, an enhancement to Adobe Analytics that estimates the impact of campaigns in all channels on purchases. The offering includes ten different attribution models and lets users drill into results by customer segments, campaigns, and keywords.