CDP Institute

There are measurements and then there are measurements.  Snapchat parent Snap has purchased Fit Analytics, which helps people find right-sized clothing.  You can file this under “social platforms expanding into e-commerce” if you want to connect it to something significant.

Elsewhere in Measurement Land, the Media Rating Council’s project to standardize advertising outcomes measurement has emerged with unintentionally hilarious conclusions that “there was not consensus by practitioners around a single method by which to measure outcomes” and “most users view current outcomes measurement as a largely opaque process in need of much greater transparency.”  Jamie in our Department of the Obvious is impressed.

You’re not the only one struggling to understand the impact Apple’s new tracking consent rules.  Here’s a helpful piece from our friends at AdExchanger on what will change with Facebook reporting.  Long story short: no more holdout tests or store visit optimization.

If marketing automation vendor Maropost has raised any money, they’ve been quiet about it. But, hey, they’re Canadian.  They did mention they’re buying ecommerce platform Neto for “$60 million + considerations”, which may be in Canadian currency. Have you noticed that a lot of companies are building comprehensive customer engagement suites?

We also have a $230 million Series F from Yotpo, which offers customer engagement modules for SMS messaging, loyalty and referrals, and user reviews, comments, and content. It’s an integrated platform but also connects with ecommerce platforms including Shopify, Magento, SAP, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. Total funding is now $406 million and the deal values the company at $1.4 billion, a hefty 14x their $100 million revenue.

Let’s follow some money today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a $300 million funding by Website builder Squarespace, which has grown to include ecommerce, email, SEO, and social content. The round brings total funding to $578 million at a $10 billion valuation. No word on revenue although a newspaper article last November pegged it at $500 million pre-pandemic.

But, hey, we can’t spend all our time worrying about privacy.  So let’s worry that 44% of marketers aren’t effectively targeting their marketing to improve lifetime customer value.  In fact, just 17% even do a good job of tracking it, according to Deloitte Digital and CMO Council.  Good news for CDP fans: marketers top priority for the next 12 months is building a unified customer view.

Do you sometimes hope it’s just a bad dream and we’ll wake up to find that consumers will gladly share their data?  Sorry, but AppsFlyer and MMA Global report that 73% of smartphone users are somewhat or very unlikely to allow tracking and 60% would never or just sometimes consent even if they had to pay for services instead.

Bees to honey or sharks to blood? Either way, adtech vendors keep swarming to replace lost customer identifiers. In today’s news: ad platform LoopMe reports its predictive models for inflight campaign optimization work 96% as well when identifiers are removed, apparently because they look at real-time behaviors rather than history. MetricWorks has combined econometrics and automated experiments to measure the incremental impact of mobile marketing campaigns. Amobee and InfoSum are partnering to enhance Amobee’s audience targeting with InfoSum’s privacy-safe audience data.

Salesforce is claiming a bit more Account Based Marketing turf with a pair of new features.  One uses Einstein AI to find and prioritize key accounts.  The other, more intriguingly, lets marketers create “personalized ABM campaigns for every buyer within top-tier accounts…even if they do not have any contacts for that account”.   That’s either really hard or really easy.  I think what they mean is the campaigns are ready to go when a contact does show up.

It’s probably inevitable that every targeting technique will now be described as cookie alternative. Here we have Epsilon and Verizon Media touting a ten-year-old program that tracks consumers with a combination of transactional data assembled by Epsilon and Verizon Media’s massive first-party data sets. What’s seems to be new is tighter integration between the two sets of identifiers.