CDP Institute

There’s nothing like a juicy CDP funding to start the week. mParticle has obliged with a $45 million Series D extension, bringing its total to $121 million and vaulting it from ninth to fourth place on the most-funded-CDP list. They also announced a LiveRamp partnership to append external identity data to a company’s own information.

LiveRamp has its own news: a Safe Haven platform that lets brands and publishers share data directly. These “second party data” deals are increasingly common as companies try to compensate for the loss of third party data without being trapped in the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. I’m toying with “walled puddles” to describe the mini-gardens of data from the smaller publishers.

No one worries more about the loss of cookies than DMP vendors, whose business was built on them. Piano, which sells a DMP along with other audience management technologies, is trying to combine its first-party DMP with “zero party data”, the industry term for information that consumers provide voluntarily. The resulting platform, Piano Zero, offers features to collect that data and use it for segmentation and ad targeting.

One of the stories we’ve been chasing this year is growth of the B2B data market. Here’s another episode: ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg, has filed for a $500 million Initial Public Offering. The S-1 shows $293 million revenue in 2019 and a $84 million loss, due mostly to $102 million interest expense on $1.2 billion in long term debt.

Customer experience management is another continuing saga. Today’s installment finds loyalty services firm Maritz selling its MaritzCX software business to InMoment, which was itself acquired last May by private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners. Maritz seems to be in a house cleaning mood: they sold their Mystery Shopping business to Ipsos in February. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/ipsos-acquires-maritzs-mystery-shopping-business

Let’s thicken the CX plot a bit further. NTT has published its Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report since 1997 so they have some street cred. Lots of interesting data here but let’s just go with: most organizations have eight or more contact channels but just 24% offer consistent cross-channel experience…while 66% have no cross-channel contact management strategy at all.

Customer journey orchestration engine Thunderhead has announced a ThunderBay, an AI-driven platform that creates individual-level optimized cross channel journeys. The system deals with the interdependencies among events, history, time, and path which overwhelm conventional methods. All good, even though the press release includes a gratuitous swipe at “CDPs and their ilk.” Ilk?

Email deliverability may not be as sexy as customer journey engines and their ilk. But it’s also complicated and arguably more important. Validity, which offers a collection (an ilk?) of email-related products, is adding deliverability to its stable with the acquisition of 250ok.

It seemed little more than a rare bit of cosmic justice when someone stole the user list of privacy-busting facial recognition service Clearview AI. But there’s more to the story: while Clearview claimed it sold only to U.S. domestic law enforcement agencies, the list includes many foreign entities and private businesses including Macy’s, Walmart, and the NBA. So they were an even bigger danger than it seemed – if you were foolish enough to believe them in the first place.

People who say CDPs are only for marketing might want to reconsider: 26% of Segment clients send data to customer success tools and 15% send to CRM systems. This from Segment’s state of the industry report, which includes a rare look at actual usage data. Download to see what other myths they’ve busted.

Predictive analytics and marketing automation vendor Exacaster was all set to launch its teleco-specific Customer Data Platform at the MWC conference in Barcelona this week but then the conference was canceled due to coronavirus. They’ve launched anyway from their home base in Lithuania. Industry-specific CDPs are increasingly common and telco is one of the more popular specialties.

Retail is another industry supported by several specialist CDPs. Speaking of retail (see how I did that?), this enVista study finds big gaps between the personalization that retail shoppers want and the personalization they’re getting. For example, 74% of shoppers want personalized promotions and discounts but just 35% of retailers have implemented that successfully. Consumers are much less enthusiastic about suggested selling based on social media activity (31%) but almost as many retailers provide it (24%).