CDP Institute

You know what else annoys consumers? Slow-loading Web pages. An survey from Web performance monitoring vendor Apica found that 32% of U.S. consumers would never go back to a poorly performing Web site or app and another 48% would be less loyal. UK and Swedish consumers were a bit more forgiving.

Gravity4 calls itself “the world’s first A.I. big data marketing cloud”, which sounds suspiciously fluffy but is backed by some substance. They focus mostly on programmatic advertising but have “apps” that support other channels. Latest news is they’ve released a blockchain-based service for paid digital advertising. Bonus trivia: the product is called “Lydian” in honor of Lydia, the first civilization to use coins (not Lydia, the tattooed lady).

Blockchain is cool, but a “video-based CRM” sounds cooler. Interactive video company nFusz has just released one, called notifiCRM. It joins notifiWeb, notifADS, and notifLINKS in their stable. nFusz tech can embed clickable links within videos and also creates super-annoying attention-grabbing “walk out videos” that play on top of other applications. In addition to video distribution, NotifiCRM has the usual CRM functions such as list imports and drip campaigns.

New tech is fun, but many marketers are still struggling with the basics. Take mobile marketing: more than half (54%) of retailers say mobile technology evolves too quickly for their companies to keep pace, according to a survey from RetailMeNot. One quarter can’t even correlate mobile marketing to in-store sales. No interactive video for you.

Enough financial news. Here’s an 88-page report from Marketo on “engagement”. I was most intrigued to find that B2B buyers are consistently more demanding than B2C buyers when it comes to personalized treatments. Less surprising: 85% of marketers think their organization provides a consistent experience across channels but 56% of consumers think brands could do a better job. Tech was cited by marketers as the biggest obstacle to doing better. And much, much more….remember, 88 pages.

Private equity investors continue to replace public markets as the main buyers of marketing and advertising tech companies. Latest transaction is DoubleVerify, which battles online ad fraud by authenticating that impressions are viewed and the viewers are human. Buyer was Providence Equity Partners. They didn’t announce a price but the Wall Street Journey says they paid around $200 million for a majority stake.

Earlier in the company lifecycle, podcast hosting and ad serving platform ART19 raised a $7.5 million Series A. More people listen to podcasts in the U.S. than use Twitter, according the ART19 founder Sean Carr. ART19 can dynamically insert ads into podcasts, helping creators generate more revenue.

Science or nonsense? It’s often hard to tell. ESPforMe offers a “brain computer interface for iPhone”, which uses a special headset to pick up your brainwaves and uses them to perform Web searches. You even collaborate with others. It’s on the Apple App Store so it must be legitimate.

Here’s another ground-breaker: “the world’s first Virtual Reality Emotional Measurement and Analytics Platform”. This comes by way of the MIT Media Lab and an “academically accepted” product from global digital agency Isobar, so it seems more credible. The platform tracks the emotions people register as they do things in virtual reality. The prototype video shows an avatar changing color based on the user’s emotions. Don’t ask how, but I know you’re excited.

If anything is more credible than academic acceptance, it’s funding. So that AI-driven analytics vendor ThoughtSpot has raised more than $160 million speaks for itself. ThoughtSpot just announced SpotIQ, which automatically queries enterprise data sources and returns “deep and relevant insights for users that they may not have thought to look for on their own”. The company says that “SpotIQ accomplishes in a single click what could take 40,000 man hours.” It doesn’t say which men, doing what, or how long it would take a team of women.

The Customer Data Platform Institute has added seven sponsoring vendors and quadrupled its individual membership since January, the Institute announced. Growth has been powered by rising interest in CDPs: Web searches for “Customer Data Platform” have tripled in the past twelve months.

Sigstr puts marketing messages in employee email signatures.  It sounds just vaguely clever until you learn they dynamically tailor those messages to the recipient. That’s more interesting. They’ve just raised a $5 million Series A to expand their business.