CDP Institute

G2 started as a software review site but now aspires to nothing less than “revolutionizing the way businesses discover, buy and manage software technology and related services.” To move in that direction, they just released G2 Track, which combines product usage data with corporate financial information to compare the software companies are using with the software they’re paying for. The goal is to identify systems that are underused or not used at all. Usage comes from Siftery, which G2 bought last December.

Most marketers would much rather manage media purchases than software licenses. Adomni, a platform to help buy digital out-of-home ads, is making that even more fun by adding the ability to purchase such ads based on audience characteristics rather than location. The secret is data from PlacedIQ that matches ad locations with information about the people who pass near that location.

TV advertising is a vastly larger market than out-of-home. It’s also getting an upgrade, in the form of increasing ability to address ads to individuals. More than half (54%) of US households now have an addressable TV, according to this report from the Video Advertising Bureau. They estimate spend will reach $3.3 billion by 2020.

I know you’d love more information about Adobe’s CDP-like Open Database Initiative, Dear Reader, but their press release has too little new information to justify a newsletter item. So I’ll give you some news about real CDP vendors instead, starting with a report that Leadspace has added the ability to target digital ads based on its lead scores and collected data.

Next, a Harris Poll survey sponsored by RedPoint Global finds that consumers are less satisfied with their personalized experiences than marketers think they are. We’ve heard that before but there’s considerable detail here that’s worth a look if you watch this topic closely. Consumers and marketers do agree that privacy is the most important aspect of customer experience.

And here’s another poll, this from Thunderhead, which is technically a CDP but (accurately) describes itself as a journey orchestration engine. They find that 38% of consumers have stopped buying from a brand as a result of a bad experience and 82% share their frustrations on social media. A whopping 94% said they’re frustrated by disjointed encounters. Yes, whopping.

Yesterday it was Salesforce; today was Adobe’s turn to try to redefine Customer Data Platform in terms that give it an advantage.

Speaking of stand-alone systems, personalization vendor Dynamic Yield was bought by McDonalds for a hearty $300 million-plus. McDonalds will use Dynamic Yield to tailor drive-through menus to local conditions such as weather and traffic. Dynamic Yield will operate independently and continue to sell its product to other clients.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably buy or sell business software. This TrustRadius study gives intriguing details on how that works. You won’t be surprised that there’s a considerable trust gap between buyers and sellers. Buyers and sellers do agree that product demonstrations are the most effective evaluation tool.

After dismissing Customer Data Platforms as a “passing fad”, Salesforce has now promised to build one. In the standard move for a vendor that has fallen behind the market, they have pre-announced that they’ll reveal “more details” in June. No word on when an actual product might be available.

The Apache Unomi CDP standard doesn’t just exist: it has been named a Top Level Project, meaning its community has demonstrated an acceptable level of governance and now gets its own Project Management Committee. Unomi functions include visitor profile management, privacy management, segmentation, user/event/goal tracking, reporting, personas, A/B testing, and more.

Contentstack is a cross-channel content management system, not a CDP. But it does rely on unified customer data for personalization. In fact, it just launched prebuilt integrations for major AI platforms including Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce that draw on that data. It’s an interesting illustration of how much easier integration has become in recent years – which in turn shows the reduced grip that unified product suites like Salesforce have on their clients.