CDP Institute

Did you ever have that dream where you’re asked to the size of the marketing technology industry, and find answers ranging from $14 billion to $230 billion?

Here’s a fun item: Toronto-based Cluep analyzes images that people post on social media, extracts information such as brands, products, and activities, and uses it to target real-time advertising. It also identifies the age, gender, and ethnicity of people in the pictures; analyzes sentiments expressed towards topics, brands, and keywords; and incorporates weather and location-based targeting. On second thought, is that fun or is it creepy?

Another dispatch from the border between amazing and horrifying: voice experience vendor VoiceLabs has found a way to embed advertisements in Amazon Alexa voice-based interactions. Apparently consumers will hear a brief ad and have options to ask for more information, add the product to a cart, and give feedback to the advertiser. I know this was inevitable but sometimes the future arrives faster than you’d like.

Speaking of inevitable: if consumers are going to be targeted no matter what, they might as well get paid for allowing it, right? That’s more or less the principle behind People.io, which gives people modest rewards in exchange for answering questions about their interests, activities, or habits. The information is used to target advertisements, although personal data is never shared outside of People.io It’s all GDPR complaint. The company just did its first major international deal, making a version of its app available to 44 million customers of Telefónica Germany.

Customer Data Platform vendor NGDATA has acquired data management and analytics consultancy Eccella to expand its services capabilities and geographic reach. Belgium-based NGDATA already has some U.S. and Pacific presence, while Eccella is based in New York with offices in London and Mumbai. NGDATA has raised $27 million and been unusually active in the acquisition front, buying personalized video creator Rednun in 2016 and data-driven marketing consultancy ENQIO in 2015.

Unlike CDP vendors, big consultancies buy little consultancies all the time. So it isn’t big news that Accenture has purchased Media Hive, which provides e-commerce solutions and specializes in supporting the Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware). But it’s still interesting to see firms like Accenture expanding their presence in the marketing technology world.

Vendor alliances also aren’t usually that newsworthy, but this one is pretty interesting: Euclid Analytics, which collects information about in-store customer behaviors through Wi-Fi, has partnered with CDP vendor AgilOne. Euclid data will feed into the AgilOne platform, providing richer customer profiles and supporting cross-channel, orchestrated personalization. Good stuff.

Account-based marketing vendor Terminus announced $10.3 million Series B funding, bringing total funding to more than $17 million. Terminus’ primary offering is Web display ads but it has broader ambitions.

B2B predictive analytics and data vendor Mintigo has added $10 million in funding, bringing its total to $44 million. Mintigo currently positions itself as an artificial intelligence platform. It assembles data on more than 50 million companies and 200 million professionals worldwide, using it to select targets, score leads, and advise insights to sales people.

Social media analytics firm DataSift announced a new Media Strategies API that will use insights from social data to help ad agencies define target audiences and content topics. The new product is an extension of DataSift’s core business of analyzing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social streams. Shockingly, DataSift doesn’t call itself an artificial intelligence firm, although it does mention natural language processing, machine learning, and Big Data.

Identity verification (proving someone is who they say they are) is slightly different from authentication (proving someone is who you think they are).

Meanwhile, a survey from eye-recognition vendor EyeVerify has found that consumers consider biometric authentication more convenient and secure than passwords, PINS, and other common methods. While fingerprints are by far the most common biometric identifier, people are also interested in trying eye, voice, and facial recognition.