CDP Institute

Did you also know that “ChannelTech” is the latest industry mashword?  Not really, since I just made it up.  I also made up “mashword”, which sounds less pretentious than “portmanteau”.  The non-fake news is that Zift Solutions and Relayware, which both help companies market through channel partners, have just announced a merger.  ChannelTech is interesting because it’s a parallel universe to martech that’s unfamiliar to most direct-to-customer marketers.  Parallel universes are interesting because they often contain ideas worth borrowing.  Feel free to call them “borrideas”.  You’re welcome.

The Customer Data Platform industry continued its rapid expansion during the first half of 2017, says a report by the CDP Institute.  Evidence includes a sharp uptick on Google Trends, $74 million in new investment, and addition of 16 new companies to the Institute’s original list of 27 CDP vendors.  Eight of the  27 firms increased their employee counts by 25% or more since January. 

Media CMS and app developer MAZ announced a partnership with CDP vendor mParticle, giving MAZ clients built-in access to mParticle’s API-based integrations with 100+ marketing and measurement tools. MAZ has deployed more than 1,000 apps and Websites for TV and publishing companies including Outside TV, Men’s Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, and Us Weekly. The mParticle integration will be included at no extra cost. Sweet.

You weren’t especially interested in yesterday’s update on the struggle for Internet dominance, Dear Reader.

Who needs Game of Thrones when we can watch Google and Facebook battle with publishers to control the marketing world? Jumping right into Season 11, we find unrest in France, where media vassals have created the Gravity Alliance, which pools their data resources to offer a programmatic advertising alternative to the overlords. But there’s already dissent among the rebels: two other publisher consortia have emerged that let advertisers book digital campaigns across their combined properties but don’t provide a merged data pool.

Across the stormy Atlantic, restive U.S. publishers have also formed a data-sharing alliance on the Sonobi addressable marketplace.

With what must surely be a contemptuous sneer, Facebook has responded with rumors of minor concessions to publishers, including some ability to charge directly for articles read through Facebook and even a glimpse at precious subscriber data. Google’s response will have to wait for the next episode.

Speaking of Slack integration, digital asset management vendor MediaValet just announced their own Slack connection.  It will allow collaborative comments, workflows, and approvals.  That seems like a fairly natural use for Slack. 

Some news is more interesting for how it’s presented than the actual content.  For example, when encryption developer Paranotek patented its latest protocol, the press release said it “may solve many of today’s online data and privacy issues.”  This suggests they felt that a positioning based on personal privacy would be more appealing than one based on corporate data security.  I hope they’re right although I doubt it.  I also hope Paranotek employees refer to themselves Paranoids.

Along similar lines, it’s interesting that mobile martech developer Tune presents natural language access to marketing metrics as a chatbot.  Apparently they feel that will get more attention.  The “tunebot” is accessed via Slack, where it acts like just another team member.  On Slack, no one knows you’re a bot.

Let’s catch up with news about AI in programmatic advertising.  Starting with a company the cutest name, Gravity4 has launched Mona Lisa, a digital assistant that forecasts which programmatic media channels will yield the best results.  She’s one smart lady, doing automated lookalike modeling, lead scoring, collaborative filtering, classification, regression, decision trees, recommendation engines, clustering, topic modeling and sequential pattern mining on data from 19 countries.  Gravity4 assembles customer data from social, CRM, email, mobile, and advertising apps based on at least fifteen acquisitions since 2014.

Programmatic display and retargeting vendor MainAd named its new tool Logico, which isn’t cute at all. It applies machine learning to individual profiles, using the results to predict individual behaviors and adjust ad bids accordingly. MainAd calls itself an ad tech company but apparently creates custom campaigns for each client, making it more like an agency.