CDP Institute

Whatever you may have heard about martech fatigue, tech companies remain enthusiastic buyers.  This Spiceworks Ziff Davis survey of enterprise B2B tech marketing leaders found that 51% are increasing martech spend this year, including 19% planning an increase of at least 50%.  They may be asking more than tech can deliver: the top feature they’re looking is a system that creates alignment across people, data, processes, and systems.

Commerce Signals builds ad audiences based on anonymized credit and debit card data.  But targeting households based on their actual purchases would be a privacy violation, so they use the purchases to find a sample of households in a target group, build a look-alike model of that sample using less sensitive data, and sell the look-alike audience.  They just made the audiences available in the LiveRamp data marketplace.

Data management software vendor Precisely has made its second acquisition in a little over one month, purchasing process automation and master data management vendor Winshuttle for an unknown amount.  The earlier acquisition data governance firm Infogix.  Precisely itself was purchased in April by private investors Clearlake Capital and TA Associates.  Precisely was formerly known as Syncsort, which purchased Pitney Bowes software assets in August 2019.

Google’s long-awaited plan to block third party cookies might be derailed by the UK’s competition authority.  The possible action reflects industry concerns that the loss of third-party cookies would give Google an advantage, since it can collect much data directly.  Expect more conflict between competition and privacy as both issues are taken more seriously.

Highlighting what’s at stake with third-party cookies, this Advertiser Perceptions survey found that 69% of respondents expect ad performance to drop when cookies are blocked and 40% to rely more heavily on walled gardens like Google as a result.  Two-thirds (65%) have not implemented new audience targeting solutions to replace cookies although 77% expect brands’ own first-party data will eventually become more important.  The survey just had 52 responses but the answers are probably typical.

Mobile messaging vendor MessageMedia has been purchased by cloud communications provider Sinch AB in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. Sinch has been bulking up its communications business with deals including a $1.1 billion acquisition of phone connection provider Inteliquent in February, followed by a $1.1 billion funding round in May. The deals highlight Sinch’s competition with Twilio, which itself bought mobile messaging provider Zipwhip in May for $850 million.

Privacy-safe data sharing vendor InfoSum has launched InfoSum Bridge, which lets users apply deterministic, probabilistic, and cohort-level identity resolution methods.    It’s a collection of matching tools that users and business partners can use on their own data as they see fit.  While InfoSum doesn’t construct its own identity graph, it does offer connections with third-party data augmentation partners.

Lotame does build its own identity graph, which it packages as the Panorama ID and offers as a way for advertisers to track individual customers without relying on cookies.  Unlike email-based IDs, Panorama includes probabilistic as well as deterministic matches, enabling more connections but raising some privacy eyebrows.  They’ve just signed up PubMatic and MediaMath as program partners, enabling advertisers to apply Panorama IDs to their audiences.

Looking at B2B data: ZoomInfo has just released a global database that generously shares opt-out requests it receives with any other company that wants to remove the names from its own lists.  It’s not clear whether ZoomInfo will also reduce its lists using names submitted by competitors.

Twilio Segment has launched a customer journey builder, named, well, Journeys, that draws on Segment CDP data and connections to 300+ applications across email, advertising, app, and SMS channels.  The company describes it as a “critical step towards Twilio’s long-term vision of building the leading Customer Engagement Platform” just in case you were unclear about their goal.

CDP Amperity is working to help companies cope with the “cookie-less future”.  They’ve added integrations with the Unified ID 2.0 identity standard and the Throtle identity and data onboarding service.  Unified ID 2.0 converts customer email addresses into a hashed email (or HEM, as the cool kids call it).  This enables individual-level ad targeting and tracking with partners who have captured the same email address.