CDP Institute

In more straightforward business news, AdQuick announced $6 million Series A to expand its business of programmatically selling out-of-home advertising. The company had already raised $3.2 million in seed rounds. Its Web site will tell you the cost of various outdoor media in your home town, if you’re looking for something to do.

We also have a $5 million seed round for Databook. They gather B2B buying intent data and use it to tell sales reps which accounts to contact and what to say. Lots of AI inside this one.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious.

Next we have a study from Braze that found 95% of U.S. adults think privacy laws should do more to protect their data and 84% have walked away when a company asked for too much personal information. Think it’s obvious that companies should tell consumers how their data is used? You’re right: so do 99% of executives and 94% of consumers.

Finally, in honor of President’s Day, our Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb Award goes to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has announced it will examine every acquisition made by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft in the past ten years to see if they were trying to stifle competition. Bets don’t get much safer.

I guess every smartphone owner knows how easy it is to create a video. But you might still be surprised that more than half the small business marketers surveyed by video creation platform Promo publish one or more videos per week. Don’t be too impressed: 64% are under 20 seconds long and 49% are made in less than ten minutes.

Still wondering if video is really that popular? Well, video creation platform Clipchamp has over eight million registered users. Most are using the free version but they have enough paid customers to justify a $9 million Series A, adding to $1.4 million in seed funding.

I couldn’t find another video story but you could make a great horror movie from this O’Reilly report on data quality. Open with a shot of data analyst angrily slamming down a newspaper article headlined “80% of organizations don’t follow data governance best practices”, follow her futile battle to gather enough resources to do her job, and end with her slowly going mad as she tries to reconcile endless, inconsistent data sources. Okay, maybe you won’t win an Oscar with that one.

Habu, which just came out of stealth with $15 million in funding, calls itself a “marketing data operating system” for “stitching together marketing and advertising data from multiple platforms to deliver a relevant consumer experience across all channels”. That sounds like a CDP but they are taking a non-CDP approach that includes analyzing data inside the “clean rooms” offered by Google, Facebook and other walled gardens. The founders held senior positions at Krux and Salesforce, which either helps or harms their credibility.

Dun & Bradstreet is accepting beta customers for Analytics Studio, which combines predictive modeling, visualization, and the ability to merge a client’s own data with D&B data and “alternative sources” such as technology installs, debtor information, intent data, and commercial property records. Not exactly a CDP although D&B purchased Lattice Engines last year and you might see some resemblance.

CDPs help customer service teams provide consistent experience across channels. I’ll just mention that since I otherwise wouldn’t have excuse to discuss this UJET survey about support channel preferences. The main message is that consumers want a wide choice: more than half wanted to text, email, chat, phone, and upload photos, screenshots, and videos. Channel preferences differ by age group except for Facetime, probably because Grandma already uses it to bond with the grandkids.

The News Gods delivered three identity resolution items today, Dear Reader. Maybe they got a volume discount. First is Merkle’s announcement of the Merkury (get it?) Identity Resolution Platform, which helps brands and publishers create, enhance and share private identity graphs. Partners include publishing, identity data and adtech firms. Applications include programmatic trading of cookie-free customer IDs. Head explodes.