CDP Institute

Nothing is murkier than influencer marketing. Klear, an influencer marketing platform, says it can fix this with a newly-announced feature to estimate campaign ROI by calculating Earned Media Value – that is, the how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage in paid media (a.k.a. advertising). Not everyone agrees that EMV is a valid approach.

Confirming weeks of industry rumors, Amazon has announced it is buying bankrupt ad server Sizmek. The deal will help grow Amazon’s already-burgeoning ad business, in addition to giving it new source of consumer data. Advertisers wanting to keep outside of Google’s walled garden may not be thrilled to jump into Amazon’s but presumably it’s better than losing Sizmek altogether. Read AdExchanger’s detailed analysis.

Here’s another adtech sale to a data gobbling giant: advertising audience building platform TruSignal was purchased last month by TransUnion. TruSignal builds a cross-channel identity graph but is known mostly for using predictive scoring to build audiences and optimize programmatic ad bids. TransUnion was building detailed consumer profiles before it was cool.

Apple gathers plenty of consumer data but is more stingy about sharing it. They’re extending their privacy story with an iPhone option that hides users’ email addresses from app developers. You have to sign in using your Apple ID but Apple promises they won’t use that to profile users or track activity in apps. Cynics will note that Apple can do this because its business doesn’t depend on monetizing customer data. Maybe that’s the point.

Then there’s this: Salesforce has decided to not sell its software to retailers who sell certain types of weapons. The move seems to be aimed mostly at making its employees happy, since consumers don’t buy Salesforce products directly.

Location tracking vendor Foursquare has purchased location tracking vendor Placed, bulking up its data collection and expanding its online-to-offline advertising attribution capabilities. Seller was Snap, which purchased Placed two years ago. Price was not announced but apparently not much more than the $125 to $135 million that Snap paid.

More data news: healthcare data integration company Abacus Insights has raised a $12.7 million Series A. Abacus lets health insurance companies unify customer data from different sources. You can think of it as a specialized CDP for health data, although they don’t use the term.

Customer Data Platforms are the top investment priority for e-commerce marketers, with 65% planning to increase spend in 2019. This from a study by Oracle and the CommerceNext conference. Bad news is that unified customer data is also the most disappointing of 2018 investments, with 52% saying results fell below expectations. Personalization and omni-channel marketing were almost as disappointing, at 51% and 47%. This stuff is hard.

As always, IT departments have a different view. Syncsort asked about business initiatives supported by IT and found the most common are efficiency at 48% and improved customer experience at 46%. Marketing and sales came in at 13%, handily beating out Other at 4%. Also interesting: just 19% were feeding Web/mobile/social data into their enterprise data lake. This is why marketing departments get their own CDP.

In somewhat harder news, LiveRamp has launched Authenticated Traffic Solution, which lets Web publishers match visitor data with its IdentityLink profiles. This enables cookieless customer identification across channels. It’s all very noble, according to CEO Scott Howe. “We’re launching our Authenticated Traffic Solution for the good of everyone in the industry—so that permissions can be honored while also democratizing identity and data for the good of all participants.”

Salesforce has introduced a “the first low-code blockchain platform for CRM”, a claim that’s narrow enough to be true. Open source Hyperledger Sawtooth technology lets Salesforce users can create blockchain objects the same way they’d create other custom objects and share them across networks in workflows and apps. Lots of practical potential. The platform will be generally available in 2020.

More blockchain: Facebook is reportedly planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in 2020. The company has not been shy about its desire to add commerce and financial services in case privacy rules crimp its current business. It’s a perfect match: blockchain works without trust and nobody trusts Facebook.