CDP Institute

Coincidence or conspiracy?  Samba.TV just reported that duplicated impressions are growing on linear TV, resulting in both wasted ad spend and annoyed consumers.  In fact, 97% of linear impressions reach the same 55% of households.  Samba’s main message is that advertisers should spend more on non-linear TV to reach a broader audience and, presumably, reduce duplication.

Off in another portion of the media forest, the communications platform vendors keep building their own empires.  The latest news is that messaging vendor Gupshup has purchased cloud communications platform Knowlarity.  The deal gives GupShup new capabilities for cloud telephony, contact centers, AI-powered chatbots, and speech analytics.  The combination of cloud communication platforms in marketing and customer experience applications probably deserves more attention than it’s been getting.

Rudderstack is usually careful to call itself a data pipeline tool that will “turn your warehouse into a customer data platform”, although their latest press release says they’re “the warehouse-first, customer data platform built for developers”.   We say they’re definitely a pipeline because CDPs are by definition packaged software, not developer tools, and because they don’t control the cloud data warehouse itself.  Whatever you call them, they a $56 million Series B, bringing total funding to $82 million.

Some people might confuse Acxiom with a CDP, although they are quite clear their business is selling customer information.  They just announced an integration with CDP Treasure Data, which will use Acxiom’s identity capabilities to help customers build their own identity graphs.  Acxiom has deals with other CDPs, although this integration might be deeper than most.

If there’s a third bit of CDP news today, I missed it.  So I’ll give you this Emplifi survey reminding you the customer experience is really important.  It’s a familiar song but bears repeating: more than half of consumers would pay more than 5% extra for outstanding CX, and poor CX effectively ties with poor product as a reason to leave a brand.  I shouldn’t be surprised that more people want to communicate with brands through social media (22%) than email (19%) or telephone (16%), but I was.