CDP Institute

4c.com is the Web site of a company that makes excellent bread crumbs, a tracking technology used by Hansel and Gretel. But today’s news is from another 4C, which tracks results of video advertising. They’ve just announced a Bring Your Own Data solution that lets advertisers load their own information into 4C reporting system. Their Web site us 4cinsights.com.

A search for attentive.com also leads to a the site for a natural supplement said to help children focus on learning. The company also sells “Genius Drops”, so color me skeptical. Where was I? Oh, right: attentivemobile.com belongs to a personalized mobile messaging platform that just raised a $40 million Series B.

The lucid.com Web domain is for sale but lucidworks.com offers AI-powered search solutions for internal data and ecommerce Web sites. They just raised $100 million, bringing their total to $209 million.

We had some interesting acquisitions last week. SurveyMonkey bought GetFeedback, a feedback collection app for Salesforce. That might sound redundant for a survey company but SurveyMonkey says it’s a strategic move to add enterprise clients.

Here’s another overlapping acquisition: inMarket bought Thinknear. inMarket serves ads and tracks consumer behavior on 50 million smartphones, while Thinknear targets ads to customers near specific physical locations. Together they can do more, um, location-based stuff.

Finally, printing industry group The Specialty Graphic Imaging Association bought NAPCO Media, which publishes several printing and publishing trade magazines. The goal seems to be a broader reach for SGIA. NAPCO is – or was – family owned.

Salesforce has signed a $1.35 billion deal to buy ClickSoftware, which helps schedule field service workers. Not very related to customer data but relevant if marketing is responsible for all customer experiences. Your head of field service might not agree.

Closer to home: Twitter has said it will no longer make third party data available for ad targeting. The move lets Twitter avoid responsibility for ensuring that companies like Acxiom, Epsilon, and Oracle have received proper consent for their data. Advertisers can still buy the data directly and send targeted lists to Twitter.

If you liked McDonald’s purchase of personalization vendor Dynamic Yield, then you’ll love Nike’s acquisition of Celect, which uses data science to help retailers optimize local inventory. It’s part of Nike’s growing direct-to-consumer business.

We have a flight of advertising news today, Dear Reader. Start with a $33 million funding round for Ezoic, which uses AI to optimize Web site design and ad placements. Ezoic supports publishers of all sizes with pricing that starts as low as free (in exchange for an ad at the bottom the Web page).

Web ads are still important but just a bit passé, don’t you think? In-game ads much more cutting edge. Anzu.io certainly hopes so: they’ve just raised a $6.5 million Series A from backers including agency giant WPP, publisher Axel Springer, and BITKRAFT Esports Ventures. Anzu’s ads show up as billboards within the game landscape so they don’t disrupt the user experience.

Sadly, no discussion of digital advertising can avoid mentioning fraud. It’s still a huge problem but the industry is fighting back. The latest thrust comes from Google, which has announced its mobile ad platforms AdMob and Ad Manager will only serve ads that publishers have authorized by listing the seller in an app-ads.txt file. App-ads.txt and big sister ads.txt have been among the most successful anti-fraud measures.