CDP Institute

Two LiveRamp items today: they’ve entered the B2B identity data market place and added Experian audience segments to their B2C data. They were in the news last week for offering free use of their Person ID to ad buyers and sellers. Seems their split from Acxiom last September has freed up some animal spirits.

To hear about LiveRamp’s adventures and other martech news, tune into the weekly Talking Stack podcast featuring MarTech Advisor Editor-in-Chief Chitra Iyer, industry expert Anand Thacker, and CDP Institute’s David Raab. Podcasts are hot: monthly listeners grew from 24% to 32% of the U.S. population from 2017 to 2019, according to Edison Research. Edison also reports that Facebook users fell from 67% to 61% of the population, although Instagram and Snapchat took up most of the slack.

Speech is important but reading isn’t dead. In fact, careful word choice makes a huge difference in ad performance, according to this study from automated creative tool Persado. Did you know that percentages like “45% discount” drive on average 23% more engagement than specific dollar amounts like “over $100 savings”? Or that “complimentary” outpulls “free” by up to 21%? It’s the perfect Daylight Savings Time gift for that copywriter in your life.  And it’s complimentary.

Online survey vendor SurveyMonkey has bought Usabilla, which captures feedback from Web site users. It’s a natural extension of SurveyMonkey’s business. Price was $80 million.

Decibel Insight offers its own take on Web user experience, monitoring behavior down to mouse movements and building several levels of summary metrics that culminate in a single Digital Experience Score, their “universal metric for measuring experiences online”. They’ve just launched a new version that analyzes individual sessions as part of a larger journey.

Inuvo does yet another type of Web analysis, deriving concepts and relationships from words and phrases within online content and then using content consumption to infer user intent. The end result is used for ad targeting. Inuvo just announced a deal to integrate its data with the AppNexus programmable ad platform, which will make the data available on more than 60 ad exchanges.

B2B data compiler DiscoverOrg has purchased NeverBounce, which provides email verification and list cleaning. DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo, which DiscoverOrg purchased last month, are both already NeverBounce customers. So you can think of this as a bit of tidying up within the on-going consolidation of the B2B data industry.

Did I say consolidating?

Don’t get too cocky: most firms still struggle with data activation, according to this study by Forrester for Tealium. Indeed just 6% activate their customer data across core functions in a coordinated manner. I don’t understand what that means, either, but it doesn’t sound good. Worth a look.

Lots of CDP-ish news for you today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with CDP-in-good-standing SessionM, which has just partnered with clienteling platform Tulip to give retail staff live access to SessionM’s detailed customer profiles and recommendations. It’s a perfect example of Customer Data Platform handing its information to an external delivery system.

On the other hand, retail email specialist Bluecore has crossed that boundary by tying its delivery engine directly to an internal CDP. Bluecore’s new product creates a unified view with customer, product, and behavioral data. This would probably meet the technical definition of a CDP if the data is shared with external systems. But even then, we’d call Bluecore a “delivery system with a CDP inside” rather than a CDP. This blog post tries to explain the distinction.

aqfer has all the pieces of a CDP but refers to itself as a “CDP Toolkit”, perhaps to indicate it is providing components rather than packaged software. They’ve just launched a new marketplace that helps data owners buy and sell personal data. Launch partners include ShareThis and AirDXP, which help to identify otherwise-anonymize web traffic.