CDP Institute

Finally, we have news about Infor, which quietly sells a slew of industry-specific cloud software products, mostly to mid-size companies. They do have a CRM product that promises a “complete customer view”, which warms my little heart. But, again, the news is pretty modest: Koch Industries, which already owned two-thirds of the company, has just bought the rest of it.

Salesforce has purchased CDP Evergage. But don’t get too excited, CDP fans: the company says its main goal is to beef up its real time interaction management and personalization capabilities. See this David Raab http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2020/02/salesforce-buys-evergage-but-not-for-cdp.html blog post for deeper analysis.

The CDP industry grew a healthy 19% in the second half of 2019 but acquisitions, new funding, and asset sales all signal creeping consolidation, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update. We could tell you more but surely you’d rather read every precious word for yourself.

Now that you’re in the mood to read industry reports, here’s one about privacy and security funding. Crunchbase reports nearly $10 billion was invested in the industry in 2019, a relatively modest 11% increase over 2018, which itself was up 44% over 2017. Yes, this is a big industry.

I’ll say it again: the death of third party data is greatly exaggerated. Here’s news that Lifesight, which has been collecting and sharing location, content, purchase, and other data for several years, has just launched the latest version of its flagship product, Flux. It’s now easier than ever to build custom ad audiences and measure the impact of marketing campaigns on store traffic.

Placer.ai also connects consumer locations to retail foot traffic – in real time, no less. They just raised a $12 million Series A, so their investors must also believe their data supply won’t be lost any time soon.

We don’t have another location-related item but here’s one more piece of AI-related funding. This is a $22.1 million Series B for Outlier, which uses automated analysis to produce “proactive, actionable insights” based on changes in data patterns. It all happens “without requiring any configuration or set-up” although you do still have to crawl out of bed in the morning.

We have a clutch of acquisition news today, Dear Reader. Dentsu Aegis Network’s Merkle agency alone accounts for two items: purchase of data services technology company 4Cite and of B2B marketing consultancy Digital Pi. https://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2020/dentsu-aegis-network-builds-out-merkles-b2b-services 4Cite is especially interesting, since it aggregates first party information for its retail clients to understand customer intent and improve identity resolution. It’s another way to compensate for the expected demise of third party cookies.

Web services giant GoDaddy just bought Over, which offers a smart phone app for small businesses to create social media content, email campaigns, and Web sites. The company says that Over had more than one million active users who create more than 220,000 projects every day. Apparently small business owners are more interested in marketing than we thought.

Here’s an anti-acquisition: Antivirus software vendor Avast is shutting down its Jumpshot subsidiary, which was just revealed to be selling huge amounts of browsing data from Avast users. The data was technically anonymous and technically gathered with user consent, but new privacy attitudes now make Jumpshot’s practices harder to defend.

CDP mParticle has expanded its data quality features and added the ability to add calculated attributes to customer profiles. Enhancements make it easier to import old data, manage data collection rules, and quickly activate new data streams. Some CDPs already have similar features, others do not.

One thing very few firms can boast is a $100 million Series B. ActiveCampaign just joined that exclusive club, bringing total funding to $120 million. The company sells an all-in-one email, marketing automation, and CRM system to 90,000 customers and has doubled to over 550 employees in the past year.