CDP Institute

Business intelligence vendor Qlik has another data management survey. They found data quality and correctness are the biggest obstacles to using it well. But I was more intrigued that 45% of companies had a new internal data source and 40% had a new external source in the past 12-18 months. And they show that better data management correlates with higher revenue, efficiency, and profits. Oxford comma forever!

You’re probably not surprised that better data leads to better business results, but would you have guessed that better privacy practices correlate with fewer data breaches? Our friends at privacy tech vendor Osano rated 11,000 Web sites and found sites with the weakest privacy were twice as likely to be breached and lost seven times as many records when they were. Something to bear in mind when you’re deciding which companies can be trusted with your data.

Singapore-based Insider assembles customer data from all sources, creates AI-based audience segments and personalized messages, and pushes the results to Web sites, apps, email, messaging, and ad channels. We don’t know if they’re a CDP because they might not make their data available to other systems. We do know they just raised a $32 million Series C which they’ll use to enter the U.S. market.

Omeda is another integrated platform, serving B2B publishers with subscriptions, marketing automation, and, yes, a unified customer database. We know they qualify as a CDP because (irony alert) they have integrations to feed data to Lytics and BlueConic. They just added a consent management platform.

I don’t know about your team, but people around here are bored enough that they’ve started scraping wax off the kitchen floor to see what color tile is underneath. If you’re looking for a marginally more productive activity, MartechTribe has released an interactive martech landscape that shows how often different products are used together. Hours of fun and it won’t hurt your knees.

Did you know it’s Hard to Believe Promises Day? I just made that up but let’s go with it. We’ll start with Fanatical Labs (great name) which offers a “no-code integration platform that delivers a true single customer view”. The product is Glances and its “helpful persona” is Glancey (not so great name). Unlike a true CDP, Glances accesses data in its original source system rather than loading into a separate database. I’ll point out that many have tried this approach and decided to create a separate database after all.

Next we have IDShield, which has extended its identity protection, privacy and reputation monitoring system to find and review old social media accounts and delete potentially offensive content. Sounds nice but we have plenty of evidence that bad comments have a way of resurfacing even after the original post is deleted.

Finally, we have a promise from video ad platform LoopMe that your ads will never appear near hateful content. Users get a range of rules to block content topics, sites or apps and to use third-party brand safety services. Sadly, those are far from perfect and it’s not clear that LoopMe is doing anything extra. We also don’t know what happens if they fail to meet their “promise” to keep your ad from appearing in the wrong place.

The European Union’s highest court has invalidated the Privacy Shield agreement that lets U.S. companies freely import data on European citizens. (Here’s the press release.) It’s a big deal but transfers are still allowed when the partners sign contracts that protect data from misuse. It’s almost as if the Europeans have decided the U.S. government can’t be trusted.

Ok, back to CDP news. Segment has fully released its Functions tool, which lets users create their own connectors to import data via Webhooks and expert it to any public API. Refinements include error tracking, advanced permissions, and custom settings such as API keys and event mapping. Let’s be clear that this is a tool for developers: maybe we need to call it a yes-code interface.

Also in CDP land: Lemnisk has added probabilistic identity stitching, AI-based product recommendations, and expanded app personalization. They’ve also built ecommerce and retail features to help move beyond their original base in financial services. They don’t claim to break new ground here but it’s always interesting to see what vendors are adding, presumably in response to client demand.

Zeotap assembles first-party data in a CDP, enhances it with its own third-party data, and pushes audiences to ad platforms. They call themselves a “customer intelligence platform” which is as good a label as any, I guess. They just raised a $42 million Series C, bringing total funding to $63 million.