CDP Institute

CDPs don’t have all the funding fun: PR measurement company TrendKit has added $16 million to its $36 million investment total. What’s to measure, you might ask? Lots of stuff, including readership, share of voice, sentiment, social amplification, and message pull-through, as well as impact on search engine ranking, Web traffic, and audience engagement. And they package all this in presentation-ready graphics.

This is one of those milestones that you were coming or maybe had happened already: Web analytics company StatCounter reports that October was the first month it tracked more Web page views on mobile phones and tablets than desktop PCs.

Wow, is this a coincidence or what? Here’s a tidbit about cross-device identity recognition, which is essential for tracking mobile activity at the customer level. Here we learn that the Foursquare social network has adopted Drawbridge as its “cross-device identity provider of record,” whatever that might mean. The real feather in Drawbridge’s hat is that Foursquare tested competing cross-device identity vendors and Drawbridge was the winner.

In largely unrelated news, research firm Forrester and software vendor Verint have partnered to embed Forrester’s Customer Experience Index surveys within Verint Enterprise Feedback Management deployments. Forrester will analyze data from the surveys, compare them to benchmarks, and display the results within the Verint solution. This will help companies measure the quality of the experiences they’re providing and identify areas for improvement.

Walker Sands and Chief Martech released a State of Marketing Technology 2017 survey whose respondents rated 48% of their companies and 60% of themselves personally as innovators or early adopters of marketing technology.

Move over, Watson and Einstein. Adobe has introduced its own cutely-named artificial intelligence technology, modestly called Sensei (“master”). Services will include audience targeting, document analysis, and image matching. This is one competition that Oracle has already lost by choosing the utterly pedestrian label of Adaptive Intelligent Apps. What, they couldn’t afford the rights to Leisure Suit Larry?

And what about consumers’ own attitudes towards AI?

Axway today announced AMPLIFY, a new data integration and engagement platform. It exposes separate data sources as API-enabled services. It is also introducing a marketplace of prebuilt services and templates to speed application development drawing on the exposed data. Axway started in 2001 as a rules engine and evolved to focus on API-enabled data integration. Its technology is used by more than 11,000 organizations worldwide. Not a CDP because it doesn’t create a unified, persistent database. But API integration does a partial set of CDP capabilities.

Speaking of data connections, Progress recently announced “the first vendor-agnostic hybrid connector that provides secure firewall-friendly access to back-office data from any cloud, independent of vendor or technology.” I’m pairing this with the Axway item to reinforce that there are, in fact, many data connection options out there. I’m discussing data connections in general to make broader points: all the data you need won’t necessarily be copied into your internal marketing database and data integration needs extend beyond marketing.

Since corporate data management seems to be the topic of the day, let’s finish up with news that the MDM Institute has found a sharp uptick in interest in master data management. Institute president Aaron Zornes said his research found 160,000 members in groups relevant to MDM, RDM (Reference Data Management) and data governance. Although CDPs are often built because corporate MDM projects don’t move quickly enough, the MDM community has plenty of skills that are relevant to CDP issues.

Customer analytics vendor Fospha has purchased customer data platform and journey manager iJento to create unified offering. Both firms are in the portfolio of technology investment firm Blenheim Chalcot, which purchased iJento in March 2016.

Datorama has integrated with LiveRamp IdentityLink for cross-device customer tracking, which will improve the accuracy of Datorama’s campaign targeting and analytics. Datorama qualifies as a CDP but their primary focus is ad performance measurement.