CDP Institute

Speaking of interesting data, we have a study from brand marketing agency Havas Worldwide, which surveyed 11,976 people in 37 markets.

B2C marketing automation is an established category but new entrants can still find a place if they offer something different.  Cordial eliminates conventional email and mobile campaigns by automatically picking the best time to contact each customer and running self-optimizing content tests to pick the best content.  It builds a unified customer database and reacts to new events in real time. The company just raised $6 million, bringing their total funding to $8 million.

MomentFeed targets another niche: national brands with local outlets, such as restaurant and retail chains.  The company’s system automatically customizes online marketing materials with localized information such as the street address and business hours of the nearest store.  It supports mobile search, social media, mobile advertising, and reviews. MomentFeed just raised $16.3 million in a Series C, bringing total funding to $24.5 million.

ReachLocal provides small businesses with an all-in-one marketing system including marketing automation; search, display, and social advertising; Web site creation and search engine optimization; plus chat, social sites, and directory listings. The company was purchased by USA TODAY parent Gannet in June 2016 for $156 million. USA TODAY just announced a phased rollout of ReachLocal to its 109 local markets.

Revcontent is a “content discovery network”, which means they put those little “from the around the Web” story advertisements on the Web sites you browse. They do it 250 billion times per month. (It feels like I personally account for at least 500 million of that total, but probably not.) They’ve just acquired Rover, a machine learning recommendation company that should help them do a better job of matching recommendations to viewers.

Innit lives at the crazy intersection of mobile apps, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, location-based services, loyalty management, and heaven knows what else.

Struggling to make sense of it all?

A survey by personalization vendor Monetate found that just 6% of respondents have deployed advanced personalization, compared with 56% who are working on it, 28% who are just starting out, and 10% who aren’t doing anything.

Singtel’s Amobee division announced today it is acquiring Turn for $310 million.

Here’s a simpler story: DigSite will deliver consumer reactions to proposed products, ad concepts, graphic designs, and such in 24 hours. The company assembles online consumer groups, presents materials, gathers reactions, and analyzes the results. DigSite carefully avoids the term “focus group” but that’s what it sounds like to me. They previously turned around their projects in one week but have now streamlined their process.

Data exchange platform MuleSoft filed last Friday for a $100 million Initial Public Offering. Mulesoft provides a type of integration by shuttling data between appilcation systems.  This makes it somewhat competitive with Customer Data Platforms, although it doesn’t create a persistent database or unified customer view. As it happens, CRM vendor Pegasystems announced a MuleSoft integration the day before the IPO announcement. This will make it easier for Pega to access external data.

In more current news, social media management vendor Hootsuite today announced acquisition of social media measurement vendor LiftMetrix. The synergy is fairly obvious. LiftMetrix connects paid, owned, and earned social campaigns to conversions, leads, and sales, allowing Return on Investment analysis. It also auto-tags content, tracks brand mentions, benchmarks against competitors, recommends campaign improvements, and stores data for external analysis.