CDP Institute

Retina’s founders didn’t get the memo that AI is no longer cool and have positioned their system as using it to predict customer lifetime value. They take the rather hostile attitude that “a majority [of new customers] are poison for the business” and promise to weed the bad ones out quickly. They just raised $5 million from backers who probably expect the majority of their investments to fail but miss the irony.

Meanwhile, you gotta love a planning software company that names its product Plannuh, especially when they’re from Boston. They just raised $4 million for their system to gather all those marketing plans, budgets, and expenses into place. There’s some AI-based analytics but they talk more about reducing waste.

Finally, we have a $2.35 million round for Casted, which offers a software-as-a-service platform to manage branded B2B podcasts. It’s still more proof that B2B podcasting is officially a thing. Speaking of which, tune into the Talking Stack podcast featuring CDP Institute’s David Raab, martech guru Anand Thacker, and MarTech Adivisor editor-in-chief Chitra Iyer. https://www.martechadvisor.com/multimedia/podcasts/series/talking-stack

CDP Optimove has purchased Axonite, a real-time event streaming framework built on Apache Kafka and Confluent. Translating from tech-speak: it will easier for Optimove to ingest, react, and share events as they happen. We can all see the value in that.

Are technophobic marketers an outdated stereotype? Maybe not: 55% of the respondents to this survey from digital asset management vendor Bynder felt automation would harm their branding efforts, although 68% plan to add new martech vendors anyway. Even scarier: the marketer-heavy sample was evenly split on whether marketing (31%) or IT (30%) should be responsible for tech adoption. Let’s be clear: putting IT in charge of martech adoption will not end well.

Even the most tech-savvy marketers are puzzled about the impact of privacy changes. One result – or maybe it’s a cause – is vendors who position barely-related technology as “pro-privacy” solutions. Case in point: Quintesse describes its natural language processing system for understanding the content of Web pages as an alternative to third party cookies. Their pitch is if you can’t target individuals with cookie-based profiles, you can target on page content instead. It’s a tenuous connection at best.

Companies with a reliable single customer view are vastly more likely than others to have very effective personalization — 87% vs 35%, according to this study from data quality vendor Melissa. Quality issues such as incomplete (61%), outdated (46%), and inaccurate data were bigger obstacles than silos (14%). Download for more.

Unified data is also essential for consistent customer treatment, which 95% of respondents to this survey by LeanData and Sales Hacker said is a critical revenue driver for B2B companies. The group ranked quality and accessible data as the least aligned function needed to drive growth.

And since we’re looking at surveys about data, let’s finish with this DigiDay report for Bannerflow, which found that 41% of companies make better use of their data after bringing technology in-house. Most intriguing finding: companies with a stand-alone in-house agency fell to 36% from 59% a year earlier. They either made embedded agency skills in their marketing teams (35% vs 23% the year before) or went back to external agencies (29% vs 17%).

I don’t mean to be cranky, Dear Reader, but today’s theme is basically “stuff you don’t care about but is the best I could find”. We’ll start with something you might find genuinely interesting: cross-screen attribution vendor TVSquared has launched a global solution to unify reporting on linear and digital TV advertising. Good stuff, but TVSquared has been doing cross-screen attribution for years, so it’s not clear exactly what’s new.

Did you wake up eager for news on the exciting world of ecommerce site search? Me neither. But I’ll still report that two industry vendors, Searchspring and Nextopia, are merging. Both were already owned by Scaleworks, an investment firm.