CDP Institute

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is having its Connections conference this week, which has generated some news. First up, integration of Marketing Cloud with Google Analytics 360 to make journey analytics from each system visible in the other. According to this TechCrunch piece, Salesforce makes clear they are not sharing individual-level data. Ability to push audiences from Google Analytics 360 to Salesforce (and apparently other systems) is due for beta release later this year.

Also timed to the conference, marketing agency Merkle announced CRM 4.0, a packaged solution that combines Merkle identity resolution, data and analytic services with an integration between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. What’s worth noting here is that connecting the two clouds is tough enough to require special integration services, and that additional services are needed for identity resolution and data management. Bear that in mind the next time someone tells you that Salesforce components just snap together like Lego Blocks.

Salesforce also announced Interaction Studio, which makes in-the-moment recommendations based on customer profiles that are updated in real time with data from multiple channels. You may have thought that’s what Salesforce Journey Builder did, but Journey Builder is for predefined sequences of outbound messages like email. Glad we cleared that up.

Data quality vendor Validity has purchased BriteVerify, which verifies email addresses in real time. Over 500 million per month, in fact. It’s Validity’s second acquisition this year, following their purchase of CRMfusion in April.

Is better data a privacy invasion, marketing boon, or a bit of both? Making the case for marketing, location data vendor Factual reports that 87% of mobile marketers say they gain value from location-based targeting, using it to target ads, location-based offers, and personalization. So that’s a good thing, right? Everybody loves a well-targeted offer.

Arguing the other side are privacy advocates like those backing the proposed California law that’s often compared with GDPR. This piece from AdExchanger shows how it’s different and in some ways even more stringent (hint: no exemption for “legitimate interest”). You won’t be surprised that it’s strongly opposed by ad industry groups.

Mapp Digital has added an integrated customer database to Mapp Cloud suite, which delivers email, mobile, Web, social, and advertising messages plus analytics. Mapp tools are based on components from Blue Hornet and Teradata Marketing Applications. Mapp calls the new offering a Customer Data Platform but it’s not clear it meets the CDP requirement for giving external marketing systems easy access to its data.

Experian has bundled its identity products as MarketConnect, offering identity resolution, cross-channel identity linkage, and persistent identity management. The services are powered by Experian’s massive store of identity information.

Small business customer communication system Podium announced a $60 million in Series B, bringing its total to $92.6 million. Podium supports online messaging, chat, surveys, and review management. The company has nearly 20,000 businesses as customers.

Customer experience vendor Pegasystems has added separate programs that let independent software vendors (ISVs) and business users develop, sell, and share solutions based on the Pega platform. ISV products will be certified and sold in an online marketplace. Business users will mingle in a gamified community.

Speaking of do-it-yourself brain surgery systems development, a survey of (mostly) technical staff by “smart data warehouse” vendor Panoply found that 62% say operating their data warehouse is difficult or very difficult and 81% would like analysts and data scientists to manage data for themselves using automated tools like Panoply. The company also just announced $5 million more funding, bringing its total to $14.2 million.

Meanwhile, a survey sponsored by business-user-oriented data quality tool Paxata found the share of companies with more than 60% of their data in a data lake is expected to nearly double in the next twelve months, from 24% to 42%. Other tidbits: just 15% of organizations have a fully mature data quality process; 72% work with only or mostly structured data; and 37% of data comes from external sources.