CDP Institute

I have many more surveys but think it’s more interesting that direct-to-consumer razor merchant Harry’s is being bought for $1.37 billion by Edgewell Personal Care, which owns Schick razors, Banana Boat sunscreen, Web Ones wipes, and more. Goes to show the growing importance of direct commerce, which lets brands bypass Amazon and is powered by customer data.

Open source Web site vendor Acquia has purchased Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform. The company says the merger will create the first-ever “open marketing cloud”, something you might not have known you wanted. Mautic, launched in 2014, claims over 250,000 users.

Looking for more ways to merge marketing automation and Web sites? Act-On Software just added real-time personalized web content recommendations to its own marketing automation platform. Visitors will get an “intelligent recommendations tray” on every Web page plus a personalized “My Library”. The new module can be purchased as part of Act-On marketing automation or separately for as little as $20,000 per year.

Why should marketing automation users have all the fun? Marketing agency Mediagistic has unveiled AdFluence, an event-triggered advertising service that can launch or expand pre-built ad campaigns based on triggers such as local weather or sports events. Ads can run on social media networks or programmatic exchanges.

After much breathless press speculation, Google announced incremental changes in how cookies are handled in its Chrome browser. Some data sharing will be blocked and users will gain more fine-grained control over how they are tracked. It was more roadmap than roadblock but still a step forward.

CDP Lattice Engines announced updates to its Atlas platform, most notably including expanded predictive modeling for customer spend and lifetime value. They also improved integration with ad channels and Microsoft Dynamics.

Here’s an impressively detailed study from Litmus on market share of email service providers, broken out by region, industry, company size, and more. Spoiler alert: there are some segments that Salesforce doesn’t dominate.

SAP yesterday joined the parade of enterprise software vendors who announce plans to launch a CDP without revealing a schedule or details. The goal they described – “to ingest all customer attributes to create a unified profile, including experiential, operational events and activity, behavioural, consent and first-party profile, and demographic data” and share these in real time with SAP and third party applications – sounds like a real CDP. We’ll see what they deliver.

Meanwhile, B2B CDP Leadspace, whose product actually exists, launched a consolidated end-user interface for data management, analysis, and segmentation. The functions had previously been spread across configuration files and administrator applications.

Bonobo is a conversational AI start-up that extracts customer insights from email, chat, video, and other interactions. No one has claimed they’re a CDP. But they did just get bought by Salesforce in a deal that one source valued at $50 million for the 20 person company.

We reported last week that many companies won’t be ready in time for the California Consumer Privacy Act, so it seems only fair to add that consent management vendor PossibleNow has launched a CCPA compliance module. More good news for procrastinators: the tech industry is still trying to weaken the law, although time may be running out.

If you care about your own privacy, you may not be thrilled that while you’re listening to Spotify, Spotify is listening back. But, yup, they’ve just started testing ads that ask listeners if they want to hear more and then wait for a response. They immediately turn off your microphone if you don’t accept the offer. I could add something sarcastic but why bother?