Lots of fun product news today. First we have the official launch of conDati, which assembles marketing data from multiple sources and uses it for reports, visualization, and forecasting. conDati ingests data from advertising, Web analytics, email, social, and marketing automation systems but seems to work at the level of campaigns, not individual customers. They raised a $4.7 million Series A earlier this month.
The venerable Data & Marketing Association (DMA) has been purchased by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Founded in 1917 as the Direct Mail Marketing Association, the DMA has struggled to adopt to the digital world. Its combination with ANA (itself founded in 1910) nicely symbolizes the merger of mainstream advertising and direct marketing techniques.
One GDPR-induced crisis is resolved: Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, is back at work despite his scandalous behavior at our GDPR Day party last week. He offers this study from Performics, Microsoft, and Northwestern University, proving that search queries with terms like “shop” indicate that someone is interested in buying things. You read it here first.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.