CDP Institute

“Email signature manager” sounds like one of those fake jobs listed on the The Onion. But it’s actually a big enough industry that one of the vendors, Exclaimer, has just raised $133 million from private equity investors, bringing total funding to $164 million. Their superpower is centrally controlling signatures for everyone in a big company.

“Virtual event manager” might also have sounded like a fake job a year ago but today it’s obviously real. Plenty of companies are working to develop on-line experiences that reproduce the good bits of live events, although it’s not always exactly clear what those were. If you’re keeping a list of the contenders, Wonder just announced an $11 million seed round for technology that makes it easier to strike up a conversation with online avatars.

Here’s a little stocking stuffer: Admetrics has just launched a freemium version of its Quantify automated campaign experimentation engine. Like its professional big brother, the system combines multivariate testing with Bayesian statistics and machine learning to deliver results more quickly and with less data than traditional A/B tests. And it can automatically introduce new variations as these become available, enabling continuous improvement.

E-commerce gets all the attention right now but plenty of small businesses like landscapers and veterinarians still have to deliver their services in person. Many prefer all-in-one solutions that minimize their technology burden. GoSite offers one of those, combining Web sites, directory listing, messaging, appointments, payments, and review management. They just raised a $40 million Series B, bringing their total to $56 million.

Even physical services are impacted by technology like autonomous delivery bots. It was just a matter of time until someone used those as ad platforms. That day has come, with news that Wrapify, which puts ads on vehicles (and applies location tracking to target them effectively), has partnered with autonomous delivery service Kiwibot. You can see it now in San Jose and soon in Denver and Los Angeles.

Some say data is the new oil, or maybe the new oil paint. Personally, I think of it as the new bacon. Whatever you call it, the folks at S&P Global think it’s worth lots: so much that they’re merging with data collector IHS Markit in an all-stock transaction valued at $44 billion. Mmmm…data.

Maybe the new oil is really shoppable video because…um…it reduces friction. Creative optimization company Clinch is helping it grow with real-time shoppable video ad units which don’t just build custom templates but use data (!) to pick the right offers for each viewer and situation.

What’s that, you thought identity data was the new oil? That means cookie replacements are like wind power.  The latest blast of hot air comes from Verizon Media, in the form of a unified solution called ConnectID. It can serve ads based on 900 million consumer relationships across 30+ Verizon Media brands including Yahoo!, HuffPost, AOL, and TechCrunch. It’s a closed universe, but a big one.

It’s always a good day when we have a CDP survey for you, Dear Reader. Twilio Segment reports that customer experience is the most common use case for CDPs (cited by 73%) and reliable, scalable customer data is the most common CDP business objective. Enthusiasm is high: 86% plan to continue using a CDP and 75% expect 5X or higher ROI from their CDP investment.

Have you taken a break from worrying how the loss of third-party cookies will impact ad targeting to worry instead how it will impact collection of B2B intent data? Sorry to spoil your fun, but ZoomInfo is way ahead you. They just announced Privacy Clusters, which uses cookie-free technology to find groups of anonymous devices associated with a particular company, extract company-level intent signals, and send targeted messages. Huzzah!

It took just one day after our privacy newsletter called out Microsoft’s Productivity Score as a surveillance nightmare for Microsoft to hide individual information. Okay, lots of other people raised the same issue. Regardless, it shows increasing awareness of workplace privacy issues, especially during the pandemic.

It feels odd to not write about Salesforce’s $28 billion Slack purchase but we already covered the rumor.