CDP Institute

You probably weren’t worried about running out of places to advertise.

SAP announced acquisition of Abakus, which uses a “patented game theory-based attribution technology” to estimate the incremental impact of marketing efforts. It will be part of SAP’s Hybris Marketing Cloud, which already builds a single customer view and executes omnichannel marketing programs. Attribution has been a hot topic recently: you’ll recall we wrote about Visual IQ on 12/13 and Proof on 12/6.

IRI, which gathers and analyzes consumer purchase data from retailers, has launched Revenue Growth Management Suite for mid-market consumer package goods manufacturers. It’s a more affordable version of services already provided to large enterprises. The suite will provide insights into performance drivers, predictive models, simulations, and recommendations for price and promotion changes. In other words, we’re still in attribution territory.

Profitero tracks consumer purchases from online stores, making it sort of the online equivalent to IRI.   The company had no real news other than reporting it continues to grow: it now tracks 450 million consumer products daily, compared with 300 million a year ago, and covers 5,000 online stores compared with 4,000 last year.  Its data lets clients compare their own sales with competitor sales, which they can use to estimate the impact of marketing programs on results.  Attribution again!

Neustar leveraged a business in telephone number management to become a major identity and marketing data provider. The company announced it will be acquired by a private investment group for $33.50 per share in cash, a value of approximately $2.9 billion. Private equity has recently been the buyer of choice for marketing technology firms, as public markets reduce their valuations and strategic buyers seem to be satisfied with their current holdings.

Conversica provides artificial-intelligence-powered sales assistants that converse with prospects on routine matters like setting up appointments, so human sales people can do more important things. They don’t call themselves a chatbot so I guess I shouldn’t either. The company just raised $34 million, bringing its total funding since 2013 to $56 million.

OwnerIQ, which helps companies share their own (first party) customer data with each other – thereby creating second party data – has closed $6 million in funding and may take more. The company makes it easier for clients to create and deploy second party data to better target digital advertising.

Inovvo lets telecom operators collect and analyze wireless network and subscriber data to find insights, build profiles, and create segments. Using the outputs in marketing campaigns happens outside the system. The company has just added a cloud-based version of its product.

Visual IQ ingests Web and offline audiences, builds individual-level contact histories, and uses them for marketing attribution and media optimization.  It announced that four marketing agencies (360i, KBS, MullenLowe Mediahub and The Media Kitchen) have become its first certified alliance partners.  The system can generate optimized media plans but not individual-level segments.

Pyze launched in March with a platform to gather mobile app user behaviors and use them for push and in-app marketing campaigns.  The company just released its 2.0 version which can also take data from Web, SaaS, and native apps and deliver messages through email, SMS, and MMS.  Messages can be triggered by user behaviors and can be personalized based on behaviors, usage, preferences, and social connections.  Pricing starts at $99 per month with a free version that only does analytics.

Sprinklr is a social media management platform, but a year ago it purchased Booshaka, which had technology to connect customer data across multiple sources. The resulting love child is just-released Sprinklr Audience, which collects data from mobile, social, email, commerce, CRM and Web systems, integrates it, and creates audience segments that can be pushed to social advertising (and presumably other) channels. It’s as if there’s a little Customer Data Platform inside, crying to get out.

SnapLogic connects streams of data from one system to another.  It calls itself an integration platform, which is perfectly reasonable.  But it’s important (to us, at least) not to confuse the SnapLogic’s application-to-application connections with the central database constructed and shared by a CDP.  SnapLogic just raised $40 million to expand its business, bring its total funding to $136.3 million.