CDP Institute

Dun & Bradstreet announced pricing for its planned Initial Public offering, at a range that values the company around $8 billion. You may recall that private investors bought the then-public firm for $5.4 billion in August 2018. Not bad.

Death of the third-party data business is clearly exaggerated. Here’s one more proof: email data provider Webbula is adding near-real-time purchase intent data to its consumer audience segments.

It’s Random News Day, Dear Reader. We’ll start with tech media company IDG, which just purchased Account Based Marketing platform Triblio. The deal will expand IDG’s marketing services capabilities. The deal follows last week’s purchase of ABM vendor Engagio by Demandbase.

Next: start-up Journey has launched a “zero knowledge” identify verification platform. Credentials are encrypted on a local device and the encrypted value is then tested against a central database, which confirms or rejects it. This means the underlying personal information is never shared over a network or seen by a call center agent.

Finally, we have Vibenomics, which sells ads in retail background music playlists. You probably haven’t spent much time in retail stores recently but, trust me, it’s a thing. Vibenomics just arranged with digital out of home ad platform Vistar Media to sell their ads programmatically. It’s another example of programmatic advertising spreading beyond its original home on the Web.

Foxbook – I mean, Facebook – has paid few financial penalties for its defacto support of right-wing hate groups. But a one-month boycott organized by civil rights organizations has been gaining support among advertisers and agencies. The North Face, REI and Patagonia are suspending their ads while agencies including Dentsu 360i and Mediabrands Reprise are encouraging clients to follow suit.

Other members of the tech elite have their own troubles. The European Commission has begun an anti-trust probe of Apple’s App Store policies, specifically focusing on the requirement that app developers use the company’s in-app purchase system. And a French court recently upheld a $57 million privacy penalty against Google.

So many brands are seen as evil that it’s worth reminding ourselves how valuable a positive brand image can be. Here’s a story about the value that Clorox is gaining from consumer trust that it’s really good at cleaning stuff. As the story puts it, “branded partnerships with major businesses sends a clear message to consumers that the Clorox name represents peace of mind.”

Feeling calm after a nice relaxing weekend? Let’s take care of that with a reminder of all the bad guys trying to steal your data. We’ll start with news that Awake Security identified 111 malicious Chrome extensions, including 79 that had been downloaded from the Chrome Web Store more than 33 million times. It was a very sophisticated attack.

Meanwhile, another security researcher, Anurag Sen, discovered that an unsecured server had been exposing billions of Oracle BlueKai records including names, email, Web browsing history and more. No word on whether anybody with malicious intent actually got their hands on it.

If you’re wondering why people go to such trouble to grab your data, this study from PrivacyAffairs found a complete set suitable for identity theft would be worth $1,285 on the dark Web. Don’t be too flattered: most of the value comes from $550 for a U.S. driver’s license and $550 for a European national ID card.  Unless you have both, your personal details are probably worth less than $1,285, Dear Reader. Sorry.

The News Gods have their little whimsies, and this week’s was to deliver three surveys related to organizational change. First we have an excellent Accenture study on what makes for successful digital transformation. They list a half dozen factors but the one that caught my eye was picking projects that force collaboration across functional lines. As opposed to the conventional wisdom which says you avoid those because they’re too hard to execute.