CDP Institute

But businesses need to prepare for GDPR regardless of how consumers eventually react. This piece in DigiDay says Data Management Platforms in particular will need massive changes, ultimately shifting from anonymous third party data to identified first party data. That will land them squarely in Customer Data Platform territory, he noted with a smirk.

Customer Data Platform vendor BlueVenn has acquired LEAP media solutions, which builds marketing databases and runs marketing programs for U.S. media companies. LEAP has long used BlueVenn technology. It’s another example of CDP vendors adding more services.

The biggest trend we found in our just-released CDP Industry Update was CDPs that include analytics and customer engagement. Right on cue, Rubikloud Technologies has raised $37 million for a system that assembles retailers’ customer data and then applies machine learning to plan promotions and target customer messages. It also provides AI-based applications outside of marketing. We can’t call them a CDP since they don’t seem to open their data to other systems. But the Toronto-based firm is chasing the same puck.

If you want a trend outside of CDPs, try “data marketplace”. We’ve recently seen them from Sonobi, Kochava, Narrative I/O, and IOTA Foundation. Most aggregate individual-level data from multiple sources to build online advertising audiences. This gives marketers alternatives to the data that Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoard inside their walled gardens. Datonics is another player in the space. They just announced their data will be available in Neustar’s Identity Data Management Platform.

Dentsu-owned marketing agency Merkle has purchased loyalty and promotion agency HelloWorld, which combines proprietary technology with strategy and execution services. Imagine a two by two matrix of marketing companies that offer technology, agency services, neither or both. Traditional agencies offer only services; traditional martech companies offer only technology. Firms like Merkle and HelloWorld do both. It’s not clear who does neither – perhaps consultants and newsletter writers.

Customer Data Platforms are mostly technology providers, although they offer just enough services to set up their systems and keep them running. Stardog is pure technology: it gives IT experts a “knowledge graph” to connect disparate information sources. Firms like Stardog matter to marketers because they reduce costs for CDP vendors or others who adopt their technology. Stardog just added $3 million to its Series A financing, raising the total to $9 million.

For a broader view of new data technologies, here’s a “big data” survey from Syncsort. It’s always sobering to be reminded that IT professionals care more about business productivity and cost reductions than marketing or customer experience. For example: “data blending”, which is what CDPs do, ranked sixth on their list of data lake use cases. That’s why marketers buy CDPs for themselves.

Is there a prize for first acquisition of the year? If so, Account Based Marketing vendor Terminus just won it by announcing they’re buying BrightFunnel, which specializes in B2B marketing analytics and attribution. It’s pretty far from Terminus’ core business in targeted display ads, which just shows the extent of their ambition to become a full service B2B marketing platform.

There’s no doubt that B2B analytics are a challenge. Content marketing platform Conductor found that just half of marketers (51%) said they could easily measure the results of their global marketing efforts. Slightly more (56%) are overwhelmed by the amount of data their systems generate when they try to extract insights. Just 3% have a single dashboard to measure overall marketing performance while 29% have five or more.

Display advertising generally ranks fairly low on B2B marketers’ priorities compared with face-to-face events, content marketing and even paid search. Programmatic buying is supposed to make it more efficient but has recently been haunted by concerns over brand safety and viewability. Still, this BrandShare study for Dun & Bradstreet found that 63% of B2B marketers are buying ads programmatically and 66% plan to spend more.  Other interesting data here: for example, fewer than half (46%) the respondents integrate CRM with marketing systems.

Let’s start the year with a couple of items from the end of December. First is the birth announcement of a bouncing baby CDP from conDati, which hatched with a $2.5 million nest egg. They’re now in beta and plan a full launch by June.

At the other end of the life cycle, machine learning-based CDP Appuri is no more. Intellectual property and most of the staff are going to DocuSign, which will use them to analyze DocuSign customer behaviors. Appuri’s existing products will no longer be sold separately.