CDP Institute

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.

Speaking of targeting: data compiler Neustar is making its audience information available to target Internet-delivered (“Over the Top” or OTT) television advertising in the Tru Optik OTT Marketing Cloud. OTT was once a niche market but it’s now available in more than 70% of U.S. households.

It’s shaping up as a slow news week, but we can always find some gee-whiz technology stories. Here’s a forecast from market research firm Tractica that predicts more than 23,000 customer service robots will be deployed worldwide by 2022. They’re talking about mobile, physical R2D2-type robots, not just chatbots.

One of those little robots might follow you around a grocery store, perhaps second-guessing whether you should buy that bag of chips.

Using weather data to trigger localized marketing seems pretty standard these days, but it’s still amazing if you think about it. PowerChord has just announced campaigns that use weather forecasts to trigger paid search and display ads. PowerChord offers a range of online advertising and marketing programs that help brands drive sales through local channels such as dealers.

Programmatic advertising in virtual reality on mobile apps: Immserv combines more hot technologies than an Ethiopian-Sichuan food truck. No wonder a dozen investors lined up for their $10.5 million Series A.

Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but mobile advertising does have a bit of a fraud problem. Tapcore, which identifies illegal copies of mobile apps, and Airpush, a major mobile advertising platform, have merged to help clean things up. They’ll create a merged SDK to help advertisers battle app piracy.

The Association of National Advertisers also worries about ad fraud and the related issue of adtech complexity. They’ve started a program to measure the costs more precisely. It will draw on the TrustX programmatic trading marketplace, a cooperative venture of thirty premium content publishers.

Hmm, a single API for all-channel personalization? Sounds great. LiftIgniter offers one, and just raised a $6.4 million Series A to promote it. But they apparently use data only from whatever channel they are personalizing, instead of building a unified customer profile. That will limit their effectiveness.

A Customer Data Platform can help build those unified customer profiles. But even a CDP needs to be fed data. That’s where Narrative comes in: it provides a marketplace for data owners to sell their data to whoever needs it. Interesting concept. They’ve just partnered with cross-device identity expert Adbrain, which says it has mapped devices and locations to 90% of the U.S. adult internet population.