CDP Institute

Not much, when you come right down to it. But marketing services agency Direct Services Inc. has nonetheless launched GDPRtoons, which illustrates key GDPR issues in ways they hope will amuse you. Hey, if that’s what it takes.

The CDPI office is closed today so we’ve prescheduled this newsletter.

It seems that automated creative management is pretty darn popular. Thunder creates, targets, and optimizes personalized display and social ads. They recently bought Adacus, which does AI-based multi-touch attribution, cross-device identity matching, natural language processing for contextual personalization, product recommendations, and creative asset recommendations based on past performance.

Then again, why should creatives be the only people helped (or replaced) by robots? “Big data-as-a-service company” Qubole has created an autonomous data platform to do data extracts, loads, transformations, stream processing, machine learning, reporting, and ad hoc analysis. How you automate ad hoc is beyond me, but whatever. The core AI skills here are to automatically analyze data use, provide insights about it to human users, and create autonomous agents that take over routine activities.

Customer Data Platform vendor Lytics has added a journey orchestration engine, called Orchestrate. The new tool lets marketers define and execute multi-channel campaigns within Lytics and push the resulting lists of customers and the messages they should receive to external systems for delivery.

More CDP industry news: mParticle announced a $35 million Series C funding and released an identity management engine called ID Sync. ID Synch is intriguing because it focuses on controlling which aspects of identity are presented in different situation. See this blog post for details. mParticle total funding is now $76 million.

Immuta isn’t a CDP: it builds unified, accessible databases for been intelligence analysts, not marketers. The company just released a product targeted at data scientists in general. Its sophisticated controls over data access and privacy protection are an interesting benchmark for marketers and CDP systems.

Customer Data Platform vendor BlueConic has released a CDP readiness self-assessment tool. After answering four questions, respondents are told their company’s maturity level and given a list of use cases that are appropriate to their situation. Nice!

BlueConic doesn’t recommend specific products based on your answers, but that’s exactly what Siftery does. It looks at what products are used at your company and at similar companies and suggests products you might want to add. Artificial intelligence is involved.

Siftery’s premise is that companies are using the right systems.

U.S. and UK marketers will spend $34 to $40 billion on technology this year, or roughly 16% of their budgets, according to advertising industry research firm WARC.

Has martech grown because of venture funding, or did funding create martech growth? Presumably, both. In any event, Braavo Capital offers an alternative to conventional financing, making credit available to mobile app developers based on customer behaviors captured by the apps themselves. It also taps into existing revenue sources for automated repayment. The company just closed it own $70 million financing, the old fashioned way.