CDP Institute

Just after we finished scratching our head over Salesforce’s acquisition of The CMO Club, email giant Mailchimp announced it had bought Courier Media, a London-based publisher whose main product is a 100,000-circulation print magazine for small-business people (not small business-people). So, martech vendors owning media organizations is apparently now a Thing. Let’s interpret it as vendors ensuring they can reach their audiences without relying third party data.

More definitely related to new privacy rules: a company called Saymine recently launched with the business model of making it easier to find which companies have your data and ask them to delete it. At present all they do is to scan your email inbox to identify which firms you have dealt with, which is just the tiniest and least intrusive tip of the iceberg. Presumably they have broader ambitions.

I could finish with any of a half-dozen privacy surveys but you know what they say. So let’s instead report that personalization vendor Dynamic Yield has added the ability to import offline purchases and match them to online identities. If doing that separately for each of your martech systems sounds inefficient, let me introduce you to my friend Customer Data Platform.

Like much of the tech industry, the News Gods seem to be phoning it in this week. They did offer a modestly interesting acquisition: CRM vendor Pipedrive purchased email marketing automation system Mailigen. Interesting because the idea seems to be for salespeople to run their own automated email campaigns. Maybe that makes them “citizen marketers”.

Sticking with do-it-yourself, tech portfolio company Redbrick has purchased Leadpages, a no-code Web site builder aimed at small businesses. Redbrick also owns digital publishing company Assembly, digital workflow system Shift, and browser development company Rebase. Its companies all run separately.

Let’s finish with another citizen Web site builder, since that makes it a trend. Shogun creates storefronts on Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, and Magento back-ends, putting the “head” in “headless commerce.” They recently raised $10 million, bringing total funding to $12 million.

We have no real news today so let’s just amuse ourselves with tech. We’ll start with a “second-generation support chatbot” from Intercom, which answers questions as soon as users start typing. You might find that rude but the vendor says it shows the system truly understands customers’ problems. Feel better?

Also on the bot front, we have Discovery Bot from Automation Anywhere, which doesn’t talk to you at all. It just watches and figures out how automate things you do repeatedly. The goal is to discover business processes but I guess it could also stalk you ex on Facebook.

Not quite a bot but close: digital agency Jellyfish has leveraged the Google Cloud Vision API to analyze performance of video and dynamic ad content and recommend the best-performing items for new ads. You could have people do that but it would be a lot of work and nowhere near as impressive.

How serious is Salesforce about selling to CMOs? Well, they just bought The CMO Club, an organization where this exclusive group gathers for learning, commiseration, and who-knows-what secret rituals. The club has 30 global chapters and 650+ members.

At the other end of the exclusivity spectrum, 74% in a sample of the entire U.S. population told the Pew Research Center that they had little or no confidence that companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google would prevent misuse of their platforms during the 2020 presidential election.

Looking for something to read when you get trapped at home by coronavirus? This 247-page compendium of global digital statistics from We Are Social and Hootsuite includes everything from population statistics to the gender split of Snapchat users in Qatar. Did you know that people in the U.S. have more smart home devices than average but make less use of voice search? Or that Americans are more concerned about misuse of their data but less likely to use ad blockers? Hours of fun.