CDP Institute

Stepping back still further: strategy consultants Bain & Company have concluded that business management itself is undergoing a radical transition.

B2B martech vendor Demandbase has raised $65 million in new financing, bringing its total to over $150 million. Demandbase has focused its business Account Based Marketing data and services, a strategy that resulted in quadrupled revenue over the past three years.

Inability to measure the impact of their efforts has been marketers’ number one lament since pretty much forever.

I know you don’t want to read about data privacy in general, let alone GDPR (the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect next May).

Here’s a sign that customer data is increasingly important: open source database vendor Couchbase has introduced a “engagement database” that is says is new class of system, distinct from transactional and analytical databases. It’s optimized for real time interactions at scale, with key features including in-memory data, full text search, and mobile deployment. They’ve written a helpful white paper explaining the details.

The need for speed extends to consumers: a study from content creator marketplace IZEA found that interest in “snackable” visual content is growing faster than any other category. Irony alert: the study on snackable content is 89 pages long. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, although I didn’t have time to get through it all. Download the actual study here.

Did that previous headline annoy you? You’re not alone: a study from SproutSocial finds that snarky comments are the least-desired of all brand behaviors. Also, don’t talk politics, use slang, or make fun of competitors. Honest, friendly, and helpful are the way to go.

BounceX has one of the least informative Web sites ever. It says they do behavioral-based Web personalization, programmatic advertising, email retargeting, and marketing automation but offers no details. Meanwhile, the company’s press release says they build a proprietary database and device graph that lets clients identify previously anonymous Web site visitors. Somebody got answers they liked: the company just raised a $31 million Series B.

Traverse Data, which just changed its name from Traverse LLC, collects consumer information from online registrations, replaces personal identifiers with unique-but-anonymous hash keys, and licenses the result to companies that link customer data for onboarding, retargeting, attribution, cross-device marketing, and personalization. In addition to a new name and Web site, the company just raised $1 million. The Web site features a match-the-picture-to-the-profile game that is probably just intended to be fun but might also be a sly comment on Internet privacy and identity. I certainly hope so.

DataSift also assembles data about people, in its case taking feeds from social media sites. Some is anonymized and some is linked to individuals, depending on what the site owner allows. DataSift just set up a feed of anonymized LinkedIn data to crystal.io, an artificial intelligence-powered “virtual advisor” promises insightful answers to marketers’ questions. To be clear (get it?), crystal.io works only with aggregated data, so it can’t tell you what Dad wants for Father’s Day.

B2B predictive analytics vendor Lattice Engines has announced a AI-based segmentation engine that finds companies most likely to convert within Lattice’s 200 million global company database.  It then feeds them clients’ marketing automation and sales systems. The AI product is in beta with release expected in the second half of this year.

B2B profiling vendor MarianaIQ was built from the start on using artificial intelligence to identify buyer personas. They’ve just announced a neural network-based model to help companies find new target accounts. Also new: a targeting option for Google AdWords, which joins existing Twitter and Facebook ad capabilities.