CDP Institute

Customer analytics vendor Fospha has purchased customer data platform and journey manager iJento to create unified offering. Both firms are in the portfolio of technology investment firm Blenheim Chalcot, which purchased iJento in March 2016.

Datorama has integrated with LiveRamp IdentityLink for cross-device customer tracking, which will improve the accuracy of Datorama’s campaign targeting and analytics. Datorama qualifies as a CDP but their primary focus is ad performance measurement.

Dataiku has received a $14 million Series A investment to expand its integrated predictive application development platform. The system combines data ingestion, preparation, analysis, visualization, workflow, predictive analytics, collaboration, and deployment. It works on several big data platforms and runs primarily in-house. This is a generic system, not specifically for marketing. But it illustrates the continued maturation of the technologies that underlie CDPs.

Pathmatics announced that Nielsen will be using Pathmatics’ “digital advertising intelligence” data to provide advertisers with more detail about competitive advertising, including new media types, purchase preferences, and targeting of different devices. To be clear, this is information about ad placements, not individual consumer behaviors. But it shows how all parts of marketing are gaining access to more detailed data and, one hopes, making good use of it by becoming more analytical.

Spongecell automatically generates, tests, and optimizes different creative variations for online ads, using customer data for personalization and content selection. By streamlining the personalization process, it makes it easier for marketers to get more value from their customer data. The company has just raised $10.5 million to expand its business.

Here’s another non-marketing use for customer data: in this case, providing intelligent advice to sales people. PROS offers cloud-based solutions to help with product recommendations, pricing, and deal management; it can advise human agents or feed directly into Web sites. And it uses “advanced data science”…but then again, nowadays, who doesn’t?

Well, this is meta: a newsletter item about a press release announcing future publication of the newsletter. I don’t think reading it will cause a tear in the space-time continuum, but then again, it might. Click here if you’re brave enough to find out.

Speaking of self-referential, this post from Friday’s Customer Experience Matrix blog analyzes the state of unified customer data using bits of many published surveys. A Franken-survey, if you will. It’s definitely frightening enough to be worthy of Halloween. Come to think of it, if you haven’t picked your costume yet, why go not an Enterprise Data Warehouse? All you need is a half-painted black box with a big funnel to pour data into and no way to get it out. Why half-painted? Because it never gets finished.

We might as well go for the self-reference trifecta. The Institute is working with MarTech Advisor on a survey about customer data management practices. Please fill it out here and pass the link on to others. Thanks!

This is a pretty technical item, but it comes down to giving marketers more precise targeting. The sort of thing that makes them happy, unlike FCC regulations that trend in the other direction.

Marketers have been fretting about the threat of serious privacy regulations for decades, but nothing that really restricts their freedom ever seems to get passed. It looks like we may be facing an exception: The FCC just passed regulations that could actually prevent internet service providers from using personal behavior data without consent. Maybe if cable companies were slightly less unpopular it wouldn’t have happened. And maybe it will still get changed.

Most Customer Data Platforms are built for enterprise marketers and priced accordingly. Hull.io is sold to small B2B firms. Cool.