CDP Institute

Finally, here’s a report from Demandbase and Wakefield Research on agency adoption of ABM.

Advertisers worried about losing access to customer data because of Facebook, Google, Amazon and other walled gardens have a new friend: ad tech company Sonobi, which just opened a public beta of an addressable marketplace reaching up to 225 million individuals across premium online publications. The marketplace uses a “People Based Identifier” that can track individuals across multiple environments, offering scale and precision to match the walled gardens. The marketplace is integrated with major programmatic buying platforms.

Tracking people outside your company is one thing; tracking their actions on your own systems is another. Couchbase is one of the few firms that has developed a database engine specifically for customer data. They just released their latest upgrade, which includes things like integrated full text search, role-based access controls, and in-memory data buckets.

Qubole is another database technology company. They don’t specialize in customer data but do offer a highly automated, cloud-based system that makes managing any type of big data much easier for the tech staff. They just raised $25 million, bringing total funding to $75 million.

If you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made, goes the old joke. But faking authenticity may be harder than it seems: adults correctly distinguished professional from consumer-created content 70% of the time, according to a study from user-generated content platform Stackla. And consumers will punish brands that try to fool them. Then again, maybe it just proves that professionals who are really good at faking authenticity do have it made. Especially if they’re Russian.

In any case, managing user-generated content is certainly a good business. Yotpo, which does just that, has raised a $51 million Series D, bringing total funding to $101 million. Yotpo helps companies solicit photos and reviews and then deploy them across Web and social channels.

Olapic helps companies manage visual content generated by users, professionals, and that in-between group known as influencers. They recently (well, a month ago) added a service that can embed shopping cart hotspots within images or videos. Because let’s face it: the most authentic thing about any brand is its desire is to sell you stuff.

It’s unlikely that anyone reading this newsletter needs convincing that tracking customers across channels is important. But if you’re looking for a factoid to support your opinion, how about this: 41% of desktop transactions are preceded by a click on another device. This means attribution that ignores cross-device identities is crazily inaccurate. Data comes from a Criteo analysis of billions of transactions across 5,200 retail businesses. Lots more about mobile, shopping apps, omnichannel, and hot topics.

The CDP Institute is having a birthday (read the blog post) and, true to form, the present we most want is data: specifically, answers to a survey asking what you, Dear Members, would like to see us do next. There are just six questions; please take a minute or two to fill it out. Thanks!

Customer data-related announcements from Salesforce Marketing Cloud yesterday included integration with Google Analytics 360 for cross-channel customer tracking, bidirectional integration of first party data between the Salesforce DMP and its email engine, and integration with ThunderheadONE for real time interactions and next best action recommendations.

American Express has launched Amex Advance, a service that builds target marketing audiences by projecting the characteristics of Amex card holders onto similar consumers. It works by matching the Amex card holder list against lists owned by publishers, ad networks and marketing audience providers. All data is anonymized before matching and the matching itself is done by Acxiom, acting as a trusted third party. In case it’s not obvious: the point is give marketers alternatives to the data-rich targeting offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other walled gardens.

Resonate also builds a targetable consumer list by projecting from a sample. Their base is 200,000 survey respondents, whose characteristics are then projected onto more than 200 million U.S. consumer profiles. The profiles are further enriched by offline and online behavioral data. Resonate just raised $8 million, bringing total funding to $37 million.