CDP Institute

You’ve surely heard already that Google’s parent company Alphabet is buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, and don’t need me to point out that this is about collecting data, not selling wearable devices. So let’s instead report that panel-based customer research company UserTesting has acquired fabulously-named Truthlab, which uses AI to find highlights in video feeds. As with Fitbit, the goal is to extract useful information from people’s behaviors. It’s Zuboffian!

It seems the News Gods were too busy with their Halloween costumes to make anything happen on Thursday. So let’s roll back to Wednesday, when marketing analytics vendor TapClicks bought reporting tool builder Megalytic. Data gathered by TapClicks’ 200+ connectors will now feed Megalytic dashboards.

Wednesday also brought news that personalization vendor Folloze had raised an $11 million Series B. Folloze uses data from internal and external sources to develop and orchestrate personalized messaging for B2B marketers.

We also have a LinkedIn report that digital marketers do a poor job of measuring return on marketing investments. The main criticism is that marketers report short term metrics without waiting for long term results. They offer no particular solution beyond educating everyone to be patient.

Customer Data Platforms are supposed to be good at connecting with other systems, so it’s always a bit unclear whether a new integration is newsworthy. But let’s lead today with an integration between the Lytics CDP and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s interesting because uses Salesforce as a delivery engine for Lytics campaigns.

Switching gears, here’s a MightyHive survey about use of first party data. Several interesting results, including that the majority of companies use less than half the potential of their data, more successful companies rely heavily on agencies, consultants, and other external resources, and the biggest challenges have to do with accuracy, cost, and privacy, not technology issues. Worth a look.

And switching again, we’ll mention Twitter’s decision to ban (nearly) all paid political advertising. You’ve probably heard about the news already but it’s still worth noting as a rare victory for civilization in its war with social media. Don’t celebrate yet: Facebook is still happy to distribute paid lies.

CDP Optimove has added real-time streaming data ingestion and access, something it calls Optidata. The announcement was made at the company’s annual PostFunnel Summit. You were expecting OptiSummit, weren’t you?

Email sending platform SparkPost is buying eDataSource, which helps identify and resolve email deliverability issues. It’s SparkPost’s first acquisition but others have been rolling up email vendors for years. Apparently it’s a lot of fun.

Halloween is the right day to announce a “headless digital experience cloud”, which sounds a bit scary. It’s like a headless CMS (meaning you can access its functions via APIs in addition to a conventional user interface) but with more functions. Bloomreach says they have the first one. Trick or treat?

Very Good Security stores sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, outside of a company’s own systems. Clients get a unique identifier that is linked to the data, so the data itself is never exposed to potential privacy breaches. It’s a good example of what can be done to protect privacy when businesses really try. The company just raised a $35 million Series B.

No more privacy today, I promise. Instead, here’s news that experience analytics vendor Contentsquare is adding AI-based recommendations for improvements in Web site and mobile app user experience. You may recall that Contentsquare bought Clicktale in July.