CDP Institute

You probably don’t need a reminder of why identification is important, but, just in case: digital identity network ID.me has released a Forrester study that found 15.4 million people were identify fraud victims in 2016, with losses estimated at $16 billion.

Berlin-based Simplaex started as a marketing platform for game developers but has grown into a general purpose marketplace for programmatic advertising and targeted messaging.

New York-based Cuebiq tracks the locations of 61 million mobile app users, claiming to cover one-quarter of all U.S. smartphones. It uses the data for ad targeting and to measure the impact of ads on traffic at physical locations. It just partnered with Exponential, which will add Cuebiq data to its own interest-based ad audiences.

Why should consumer marketers have all the tracking fun? San Jose-based KickFire uses IP addresses to identify the company of Web site visitors. It has just announced a partnership with account based marketing ad vendor Terminus, which will measure how many Web site visitors come from companies targeted by Terminus-placed ads. It will also identify companies of other visitors, who are presumably also potential prospects.

Let’s talk local marketing. eRelevance is a “marketing automation service” whose staff uses proprietary technology to run retention and upsell programs for small business clients. The company just took $5.1 million more funding, bringing its total to $13.7 million since 2013. With nearly 800 customers and $4 million annual run rate, it costs about $5,000 per year: reasonable but still more than many small businesses will spend.

Empyr uses geo-fenced advertising to make offers to people near a store. But its real differentiator is connecting ads to in-store purchases. It does this by offering consumers rewards for registering their credit cards, serving those consumers ads on partner Web sites, and charging retailers a fee when the consumers make a purchase. Part of the trick is deep integration with the credit card companies to gather the purchase data.

Reveal Mobile also assembles permission-based local audiences, in its case by gathering mobile device signals through public beacons, GPS, and wifi networks. It recently launched a new platform, Social Direct, that lets marketers select audiences based on location, including visits to their own store or a competitor, as well as broad interest categories. Marketers can then target those audiences on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google AdWords, and other channels.

SimpleReach has built a niche business in assembling information about marketing content consumption, calling itself a “content data platform” although it doesn’t use the initials CDP. Data gathered by the system is used to by publishers and marketers to create a unified view of content distribution. The company just announced $13 million in funding, bringing its total to $24 million.

CELUM manages content creation, management, distribution, and monetization. Its core business is digital asset management but it has just added project management and a content marketplace that lets creators and marketers buy, sell, and share content. They call the extended offering a Content Productivity Platform, which would be CPP if they used the abbreviation. Which they don’t.

Rubrik offers a “Cloud Data Management platform”.  That sounds super-sexy but is mostly about boring things like data backup and copy management. On the other hand, they just raised $180 million in Series D at $1.3 billion valuation. That’s sexy in its own way.  No, they don’t call it a CDMP.

Adtech vendors keep trying to profit from industry turmoil. Ad inventory marketplace Adfresco is a good example: trading on concerns about fully-automated ad buying, they now position their service as “bringing the human aspect back to automated buying and selling”. In concrete terms, this means that publishers can post inventory options online with a link to an account executive or sales team that must be contacted to make an actual purchase. Charmingly retro. I wonder if they offer drone-based martini delivery.

Privacy is another spot of troubled water where adtech vendors are fishing. AppNexus has announced an initiative to ensure compliance with privacy rules imposed by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Not breaking the law isn’t usually a differentiator, but so many companies are lagging in GDPR preparation that it could well turn out to give AppNexus an advantage.