CDP Institute

Databricks loads data into a cross between a data lake and a data warehouse that it, inevitably, calls a “lakehouse”. They’ve just made it easier to build data ingestion pipelines, to build a unified catalog of the ingested data, and to use the data without exporting it. Again, not quite a CDP but the boundaries get blurrier every day.

You’re not too interested in funding announcements, Dear Reader, but maybe $500 million will catch your attention.  That’s what digital experience analytics platform Contentsquare just raised in their Series E, bringing total funding to $810 million.  Contentsquare is a niche product but it’s a big niche.

Call analytics is small niche where Invoca is one of the big frogs. It just got bigger by gobbling up DialogTech, which does more or less the same thing but targets smaller clients. Invoca’s funding to date is $118 million, which makes the reported $100 million price for DialogTech a big gulp.

Analytics systems like Contentsquare and Invoca rely heavily on artificial intelligence. But this FICO report paints a disturbing picture about AI governance: it finds just 20% of companies actively monitor their AI models for fairness and ethics, and 68% of respondents say their company’s processes to ensure AI complies with regulations are ineffective. Almost as many, 65%, say their AI systems can’t explain how decisions are made.

LiveRamp, whose main business has been matching clients’ data against its own identity graph, is now helping clients match their own data against itself.  Portrait Engine, now in beta, lets clients use LiveRamp’s matching technology to build custom ID graphs.  They can build different graphs for different purposes and still match their data against third party information from LiveRamp and others.

D4t4 Solutions’ Celebrus CDP is offering its own system for matching first-party identifiers and assembling customer profiles based on the results.  It runs in real-time and takes advantage of Celebrus’ core technology, which collects detailed behavioral data without conventional Web site tags.  If you’re wondering about the name “D4t4”, it looks like “Data” if you print it in the right font and have had a pint or two.

Many companies don’t have enough data of their own to build an effective identity graph or complete profiles.  Stirista fills the gaps with third party data, both by enhancing existing customer records and adding new contacts.  Stirista just launched Access B2B, a new division focused on B2B clients.  In addition to data, Stirista provides email and advertising campaigns.

Few marketers doubt that personalization works but it’s still nice to see some proof.  This study by personalization vendor Aki offers proper test vs control comparisons, although they only created a handful of segments and showed the same “personalized” ad to everyone in each segment.  It does show the segment-specific messages beat generic messages and offers some details which groups are most responsive.

This IAS study relied on consumer surveys rather than behaviors, so it’s not as reliable as a real test.  But you’ll still probably like the answers: 77% of Twitter users said they’re comfortable sharing data with Twitter for a better ad experience; 59% said they’re remember an in-feed ad if it was relevant to surrounding content; and 54% said they’re comfortable engaging with ads that appear next to “personal content”, whatever that means.

Switching back to hard data: Nielsen identified more than 1,200 website URLs containing anti-Asian hate speech and found more than 250 ad campaigns that ran on them, with a spend of $153 million in the first quarter of this year alone.  The list includes a dozen Fortune 500 companies who were effectively funding hate speech but Nielsen pulls its punch by not naming them.