Business data giant Dun & Bradstreet has agreed to be acquired by a private investor group in a deal valued at $6.9 billion. The company had announced in February that it was considering options for value creation. D&B has shown little growth in recent years despite the broad surge in data-driven B2B marketing.
Customer Data Platforms are deployed by 38% of the marketers and vendors surveyed by Winterberry Group in a new report for the DMA. The figure is impressive although CDPs still lag Data Management Platforms (48%), Third party data (51%) and CRM databases (69%). Other results: insights and email targeting are the most goals for identity-related investments and extracting data from “walled garden” vendors like Facebook, Google, and Amazon is the biggest challenge in identifying addressable audiences. Lots more.
Tru Optik also does device-based targeting, although not to identified individuals. It has just partnered with Triton Digital, which supports online audio publishing and advertising, to help target ads to streaming radio and podcast audiences. Podcasts are hot – including this one featuring CDP Institute’s own David Raab among others.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.