CDP Institute

Video is great but some things are still more fun in person. I’m talking about business meetings, of course. Event management system Bizzabo has just raised $27 million to expand its business, bringing total funding to $56 million.

If you’ve been wondering what happened to Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, it turns out that assigning him to the Facebook Is Evil beat was a mistake because it’s a full time job. Jamie did stop giggling long enough to share this pair of items reporting that people would rather receive text messages than sales phone calls and are more likely to open a text message than an email. As Jamie points out, it’s also obvious this will change if text is overrun with irrelevant advertising.

6sense started as a predictive modeling platform but has reinvented itself as a tool for account based marketing orchestration, in part leveraging its intent data and in part by purchasing the ZenIQ ABM platform. Something must have worked, since they’ve just raised another $27 million, their first round since 2015. Total funding is now $63 million.

Improvado lets non-technical users assemble marketing data from multiple sources and make it available for reporting. It doesn’t seem to build customer-level profiles, though, so it’s not a CDP. They just raised $8 million in a “super seed” round, which apparently is now a thing.

In a bit of a head scratcher, Salesforce has purchased its own nonprofit spin-off, Salesforce.org, for $300 million. The money will go the philanthropic Salesforce Foundation. Salesforce.org, which makes Salesforce software available to nonprofits at deep discounts or for free, will now be part of the for-profit Salesforce.com business. Salesforce expects the change to help it grow sales in the non-profit, education, and philanthropy sectors.

CDP vendor Stride has launched Engagement Engine, a tool that lets non-technical users build automated cross-channel campaigns. Stride, whose founders are Salesforce refugees veterans, has particularly close integration with Salesforce marketing and sales clouds.

CDP vendor BlueConic also has some new goodies: in its case, an AI Workbench that makes it easier to build and deploy models that take advantage of BlueConic’s customer profiles. The package includes tools to help data scientists build models more quickly and a collection of prebuilt models that marketers can use without outside help.

Just for fun, let’s write about a company that’s not a CDP (and doesn’t claim to be). TruSignal builds audiences with first party data from multiple sources and applies an identity graph to build unified profiles. Sounds CDP-ish, but TruSignal only stores audience tags, while a real CDP stores full details of customer behavior. They’ve just updated their platform with a new user interface and audience building tools.

Ad agency giant Publicis announced a $4 billion purchase of data-driven marketing agency Epsilon from Alliance Data. The deal illustrates the transformation of mass media into addressable advertising. Attentive readers will recall that Alliance announced Epsilon was on the block last November and that Publicis-competitor IPG announced its purchase of Epsilon-competitor Acxiom for $2.3 billion last July.

Need evidence that mass media is increasingly addressable? Try this study from Comcast-owned FreeWheel Research reports that 40% of all ad views were delivered on a connected TV device in 2018. Half of advertisers and agencies combine the buying of digital video and linear (broadcast) TV today and 91% say they will by 2021.

Connected TV means more than addressing individual consumers: it means consumers can buy things through their video device. Sure enough, this study from Telaria and Hulu shows that connected TVs are the medium of choice for buyers of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. DTC buyers spend 70% more time streaming TV than using social media and 80% of DTC shoppers think DTC brands give them a closer relationship than shopping on Amazon. Serving this market is another way that Publicis will benefit from Epsilon’s direct marketing heritage.

Customer engagement platform CleverTap has raised a $26 million Series B, bringing total funding to $41.6 million. CleverTap started with mobile marketing but it now supports other channels and includes a CDP among its features.