CDP Institute

And an acquisition: partner management platform Partnerize has purchased brand safety platform BrandVerity. The deal will make it easier for Partnerize clients to ensure the affiliates are complying with rules for how brands can be presented. Did you notice that everything’s a platform these days?

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the go-live date for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), so it’s fitting that we have privacy news. First is a $16 million raise by Evervault, which promises to keep personal date safely encrypted and only allow API calls to process it within “privacy cages” that do not expose the unencrypted contents. Companies would not store any sensitive data and thus avoid most burdens of GDPR compliance, the company says.

Skyflow just raised $7.5 million for its own privacy, which also stores sensitive data for clients and allows access through API calls. Details are not clear so we can’t judge how it differs from Evervault’s approach. But in any case, API-based privacy systems are officially a Thing.

Trust Stamp preserves privacy with a biometric-based identity token that’s unique for each individual but doesn’t reveal any personal information. This lets companies identify shared customers and authenticate individual identities without exposing personal data. They launched a Seedvest campaign last week which has so far raised $2.7 million of a $5.6 million goal, plus another $2.6 million from private investors.

You do love Adobe headlines, Dear Reader. So although I’m not entirely impressed that Adobe Audience Manager has added an ability to predict which segment a new Web site visitor will eventually join, I’ll mention it. For good measure, I’ll throw in a separate Adobe announcement from earlier this week, that they are adding AI-based predictive model scores and multi-touch attribution to Adobe Experience Platform.

Personalization platform and CDP SmarterHQ also has a new predictive model builder. It creates different kinds of self-tuning models and SmarterHQ says it’s the only personalization platform to build predictions using all types of data, not just purchases. Seems unlikely but it’s an interesting claim.

Here’s another feature announcement: data orchestration platform and CDP Openprise has released API Factory, which transforms automated business processes into custom APIs. This makes it easy for other systems to call an Openprise processe as a service. Nice.

Ecommerce within social media platforms has been a trend for some time and the pandemic makes it even more important. So it’s not surprising but still worth noting that Facebook has launched Shops, which lets small businesses set up an online store within their Facebook and Instagram profile pages. There’s no altruism here: Facebook will charge a small fee for sales and expects this will generate more advertising.

Ecommerce is already booming without Facebook’s help, in case you haven’t heard. Contentsquare supports the industry with advanced analytics and AI-powered recommendations, evaluating ten trillion (with a “t”) consumer interactions per day. They just raised a $190 million Series D, brining total funding to $310 million.

AI-powered recommendations are great but racial, gender, and other biases are a known problem. Customer engagement vendor Pega has added Ethical Bias Check, which simulates the results of an AI-driven strategy and checks if results skew towards or away from a particular group. We don’t know how well it works but give them credit for trying.

There’s a ton of good information in this just-released State of Marketing report from Salesforce. The headline from a CDP view is that high-performing marketers listed CDP as the second-most commonly used technology while CDP ranked fifth for moderate performers and sixth for underperformers. They survey doesn’t show how many actually have a CDP but 38% of the total and 48% of high performers said they plan to use it more next year.

Customer journey analysis vendor Pointillist also has a good new report. No specific mention of CDP but they did find that lack of a single customer view is the top customer experience challenge. Nearly one-third of high performers (31%) said they have accessible and unified customer data compared with 8% of average performers and 3% of underperformers. We all know correlation doesn’t prove causation but I know how I’m betting.