CDP Institute

For a broader picture of consumer behavior, we have a study from market research firm PQ Media, which found total media usage has reached seven hours per day worldwide and ten hours per day in the U.S. Mobile media are growing fastest while desktop usage is declining.

So much news, so little space.

More about marketing to people: Customer Data Platform vendor mParticle has created its own little consortium of sorts, allowing its own clients to directly share audience lists for mobile marketing. The sharing deals are negotiated directly by the parties, with mParticle just supplying the shared technology. It’s an interesting value-add for mParticle.

And still more about people-based marketing: Heap has technology that captures Web site behaviors without setting up tracking for each event individually. As the company puts it, they “automate away the annoying parts of analytics” so people can focus on the fun stuff. Behaviors can be tied to individuals, which isn’t always the case with Web analytics. The company just raised $27 million, for total funding of $40.2 million.

One of the trends we keep an eye on is tech consultancies adding expertise in data-driven marketing. Deloitte has connected another dot by purchasing the assets of Web Decisions, a Greensboro, NC-based firm providing data management and marketing services. It will enhance Deloitte Digital’s “Customer Experience Value” offering, cleverly abbreviated as CXv, which Deloitte describes as “a new model for a new age – a creative digital consultancy.” I’m excited.

Yieldify also helps marketers with technology plus services. Their specialties are on-site Web messages and email remarketing, recently productized as the “Yieldify Conversion Platform” (no acronym). The company just took a $6 million Series B funding, adding to a $11.5 million Series A in 2015. It also took on a new chairman, John Giuliani, who previously held senior positions at madtech heavyweights including Conversant, Dotomi, and Catalina Marketing.

Marketers who want to do things for themselves can buy software from vendors like Alterian, which re-emerged as an independent company last November.

Manthan calls itself a retail analytics firm but actually does much more: it assembles unified customer data, creates predictive models, and executes targeted campaigns. They also offer analytics for merchandising, supplier collaboration, store operations, financial management and human resources. Manthan has just upgraded their Customer360 customer analytics solution, which they (accurately) describe as a customer data platform. Oh, they separately announced a voice-based conversational interface for business analytics. AI-powered, of course.

CDP vendor BlueVenn surveyed marketers and consumers. They found that 86% of marketers feel they need to collect as much information as possible for maximum success but 81% actually collect only data that is “strictly necessary”. Consumers are even more confused: 70% find personalized advertising “creepy” while 63% find personalized recommendations useful and 83% hate irrelevant advertising. Plus other interesting tidbits.

Data management tool vendor Talend surveyed IT managers and consumers.

Zeta Global (formerly Zeta Interactive, formerly XL Marketing) has raised $115 million in equity and $25 million in debt financing, bringing its total past $250 million since 2007. The company provides a a SaaS-based marketing cloud supported by strategy, creative, execution, and analytics services. Acquisitions have included Acxiom Impact (email) and ClickSquared (multi-channel campaigns).

Cloud-based data visualization vendor Domo has closed a $100 million funding round, making its total almost $700 million. Domo has prebuilt connectors for more than 400 applications and provides basic functions to clean, transform, and combine the data it ingests. Options are available for private clouds, on-premise storage, or federated access (i.e., reading data without importing it). Users can attach visualization apps to the data Domo assembles, but Domo does not provide direct access in the way of a Customer Data Platform. In case you were wondering.