CDP Institute

CDP CrossEngage is merging with predictive analytics vendor GPredictive, in a deal that also adds €6.5 million ($7.6 million) in new venture funding. The combined firms will operate under the CrossEngage brand although both products will still be sold separately and top managers from both firms will remain at the company.

Messaging company Airship has acquired ReplyBuy, which enables two-way conversations and payments over SMS. Airship plans to add commerce capabilities to all its channels. Perhaps you’ve heard that ecommerce has grown rapidly this year.

Third-party cookies may be vanishing but Lotame still sells third-party data enrichment. They’ve just partnered with ad platform Amobee, which has its own identity graph, to target Lotame audience segments on major social platforms.

We have two big funding announcements today: a $230 million Series D for personalized text messaging platform Attentive and $300 million for marketplace platform Mirakl. But haven’t seemed interested in such things recently, Dear Reader, so let’s instead look at this Merkle survey on customer engagement technology. Lots of fun facts including: 67% prefer best-of-breed vs a single-stack architecture; 79% prefer custom-built to off-the-shelf systems; and 26% have API access to a central customer file. Download for more.

Our friends at Gartner have their own new survey, this time about marketing organizations. Two-third of companies said they have a fully or mostly centralized marketing organization; 49% have shared services groups; and a growing fraction (now 27%) have a functional organization, compared with industry (20%), brand (19%), channel (20%) or geographic (14%) organizations. Oh, and companies use agile project management are more effective at everything.

Forrester analysts have also been hard at work, with a Google-sponsored study finding that better use of data and analytics is a top-5 priority for 63% of marketers and siloes are the top data challenge (57%). Fewer than half (42%) have a cross-platform view of Web and app analytics, which might seem like a little or a lot. But 84% consider cross-platform analytics critical or very important, so let’s call that glass half empty.

Salesforce has announced Digital 360, a combination of components from Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud plus new bits including its long-awaited CDP, named Customer 360 Audiences. General availability for Audiences is set for October.

HubSpot had its own announcements today, most notably an upgrade to its Sales Hub CRM to include custom objects, improved sales reporting, and more advanced permissions management. These are table stakes for enterprise clients as HubSpot raises its sights beyond small business.

MailChimp is sticking with its small business base but adding more features to serve them better. Its latest expansion is Smart Platform, a slew of AI-powered features including product recommendations, predictive models, visual asset design, and email subject line advice.