CDP Institute

B2B has been a growing market for CDP vendors, apparently for longer than we realized: this MeritB2B study finds that almost 40% of respondents have a CDP in place already and another 12% plan to buy one.  In fact, centralized customer data was vastly more common than predictive analytics, lead scoring, programmatic advertising, or intent data.  Who knew?

Satisfaction among CDP users is high: 90% told MessageGears they would definitely (56%) or likely (34%) buy one again. This didn’t stop MessageGears from continuing to argue that CDPs are confusing failure and touting their alternative of reading customer data directly from source systems – an approach that many others have tried and abandoned.  Also interesting: 25% said they bought their CDP, 12% said they built it, and 60% said they did a mix of both.

Advertisers hoping to avoid placements on misinformation news sites can now rely on exclusion lists prepared by the NewsGuard rating service,  The lists will be available through Comscore’s contextual targeting solution, which applies pre-bid inventory filters to programmatic ad purchases.  NewsGuard creates a trust score for news sites based on criteria such as publication of false content, corrections when errors occur, and source of funding.

There’s a geeky sort of comfort in applying the familiar build vs buy debate to CDPs.  But the boring truth is every company will do a mix of both.  Twilio Segment has further blurred, or maybe clarified, the issue with a new Developer Toolkit that helps technical staff tailor their Segment CDP to their own business needs.

CDPs are fun, but they’re just a tiny corner of the martech industry.  Adobe has provided today’s reality check by paying $1.275 billion for Frame.io, whose very narrow function is to provide review and approval functionality for video creators.  That’s not to say Frame is insignificant: they have about 275 employees and claim more than one million users.

InfoSum’s niche is privacy-safe data sharing in a data clean room-ish fashion.  It’s a capability some CDP vendors have (BlueConic just announced one) and others are likely to add through building, buying, or integration.  InfoSum itself just raised a $65 million Series B, bringing total funding to $90 million.

ActionIQ has integrated with Merkle’s Merkury identity platform, making it easier for clients to match, enhance, and activate customer profiles. The relationship isn’t monogamous: ActionIQ has similar deals B2B data vendor Data Axle and B2C data giant Neustar. They also just became available on the AWS Marketplace.

CDP Ascent360 has also been making friends. They just added their system to ecommerce platform BigCommerce App Marketplace. Ascent360 joined the Shopify App Store in July and the Lightspeed app store in June.

Neustar has other news: they just launched Fabrick Impact Assessment, which will predict the impact of cookie- and device ID loss on your company’s media and measurement investments.  There’s a free tool that gives a rough answer based on how much advertising a company does in different channels, and a more elaborate version that (apparently) applies an impact score to specific vendors.   Need we add that Neustar’s offers identity alternatives to cookies and device IDs?