CDP Institute

Personalization vendor Monetate also has an AI-related announcement: they’ve added reporting to clarify the basis for their AI’s personalization decisions. This is noteworthy because AI’s inability to explain itself is often a stumbling block to adoption. Specifically, Monetate will now show which data categories most influenced individual decisions – a technique that’s been used for years with non-AI predictive models but is still not common in AI. The same information helps marketers uncover new customer segments.

Yesterday’s news about Acxiom turned out to be great click-bait. Who knew? So here’s more vendor news: personalization and CDP vendor Evergage is opening a European operation with headquarters in exotic Stuttgart.

Who put the fun in funding? Perhaps whoever put the steal in stealth. In any case, Attentive is a personalized mobile messaging platform for retailers that just emerged from stealth with a $13 million Series A. They’ve found that text outperforms email to the tune of 10X more revenue per contact. No mess in those messages.

There might be some ire in acquire but this is getting tired. We’ll just report that B2B data enrichment vendor FullContact is buying Contacts+, a mobile contact management app with millions of users. FullContact mostly feeds it data into other systems through APIs but it does have its own mobile app, so this will expand its user base.

Assembling unified data for customer success management is a core use case for Customer Data Platforms. That’s why you should care that Bolstra has just raised $1.5 million for its B2B customer success platform. It’s the company’s second “seed” round, following a $1.5 million raise last February. Bolstra tracks customers through their lifecycles, recommends actions, and provides structured workflows for those actions. It builds a complete view of each customer but doesn’t share it as easily as a true CDP.

It may be even less clear why you should care that marketing data and services giant Acxiom has reorganized itself into separate data and services units.

Coincidentally, we have a survey from data vendor Experian, which last year spun off its own marketing services business as Cheetah Digital.

Marketing Evolution offers an advanced attribution methodology that uses individual-level data to recommend an optimal media mix. It’s complicated but worth exploring. They just raised $20.6 million, bring total investment to date to $24.6 million.

Another funding announcement: Toulouse-based IntuiLab has raised a $3.7 million Series A. IntuiLab provides tools to create and deploy touch-screen-based digital experiences without any programming. This is location-based marketing without location tracking, which could become more important if privacy rules actually limit marketers’ ability to track individuals.

Just-launched Accretive Media offers another version of marketing through public screens.

Berlin-based location data company uberall has raised a $25 million Series B, bringing its total to just under $30 million. Uberall helps companies distribute accurate information about physical locations to online directories, maps, social networks and navigation services.

Data about store locations is most important to local marketers. A report from BIA/Kelsey finds that franchise marketers, which are mostly local businesses, concentrate their spending on locally-targeted media including direct mail, Facebook ads, Internet Yellow Pages, and community sponsorships. Most use their own marketing software and services but they still want the franchise parent to provide training in digital marketing.