CDP Institute

More evidence that data-driven advertising isn’t dead: Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital is paying $150 million for MightyHive, a digital ad services company. S4 already owns digital content production company MediaMonks.

Facebook, Google, and other “walled gardens” sell advertising based on their own data without sharing it. Amazon is joining the club, switching from a search-driven marketplace to one where brands must pay to be seen. Amazon ad specialist Quartile found the change is happening quickly: the share of Thanksgiving-weekend sales driven by ads grew 54% this year over 2017, reaching 25.1% of the total. Amazon is already the third largest digital ad publisher.

We have actual CDP news today, Dear Reader. First, CDP Ascent360 announced a $4.1 million Series A investment. Ascent360 specializes in small and mid-sized clients and reports that its business doubled in 2018.

Next: Marketing G2, a CDP for subscription marketers, has been purchased by NEWSCYCLE Solutions, which offers a range of products for the global media industry. Price was not announced.

Finally – wait, we’re out of CDP news. So let’s finish with news that consumer products giant Unilever is funding free showers and other hygiene services for homeless people across the USA. It’s both on-brand (they make soap) and bold (no brand wants to be preferred by street people everywhere). Good for them for knowing what’s important.

Identity resolution vendor Signal has joined the Adobe Exchange Partner Program, adding its 300 million persistent IDs to the Adobe Audience Data Management Platform. This means personal identifiers stored within the DMP can be linked in real time to Signal IDs, which in turn may be connected to other types of data.

Some identify management starts with companies trying to figure out who people are. Some starts with people identifying themselves to companies. Mastercard and Microsoft have announced a “strategic collaboration” to help with self-identification. The main idea seems to be building sharable identity credentials into personal devices which are in turn tied to Azure cloud services. In theory, this could reduce the amount of personal information stored elsewhere. Because a tech-savvy company like Microsoft could never get hacked, right?

Oh wait – what about hacks at tech-savvy Amazon, Facebook, Equifax, and so many more? You can add Quora to the list: “approximately 100 million” Quora users’ data was compromised including name, email address, and public comments, the company said yesterday. They’re “very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause.”

Any chance you’d hear more about Amazon’s pre-Thanksgiving data breach was swept away by Friday’s report that personal information on up to a 500 million guests at Marriott, Sheraton, Westin, and other Starwood hotels was exposed in a hack of its reservation systems. The breach began in 2014 and was only shut down this past September. We also learned last week that more 60 million email accounts were exposed over two years by a breach at the U.S. Postal Service.

This may not be the best time to mention selling sensitive personal data, but you might still want know to that location-based ad specialist inMarket has launched a new suite of tools to create “interactive moments” via mobile app experiences tied to the customer’s current physical location. The location data is is based on beacon, Wifi and GPS data from first-party integrations with 50 million popular apps. Messages can promote online or in-store purchases, include games, or let consumers swipe on the offer they find most appealing.

Targeting data company Claritas is also plunging ahead with business as usual, announcing purchase of Barometric, which connects mobile IDS to people to optimize ads and measure results. It’s an expansion beyond Claritas’ traditional business in offline marketing.  Remember when PRIZM codes were the hot new thing? Me neither.

For no obvious reason, today brings three investments in collaboration systems. Start with purchase of a majority share in work management platform Wrike by Vista Equity Partners. Vista – or VEP to its friends – has bought quite a few well known martech companies, including Marketo, Xactly, and Cvent.