CDP Institute

Restaurant CRM, marketing, and loyalty system vendor Bridg has acquired restaurant mobile app specialist Relevant Mobile. It’s yet another example of vertical market specialists building alternatives to general purpose CDPs and marketing products. Because you wanted more examples, right?

This item illustrates two trends: data synchronization vendor PieSync has integrated with Synapp.io’s DataValidation email list cleaning service. Trends are data synch as a supplement or replacement for a shared persistent database, and external data quality services as a supplement or replacement for services built directly in the customer data management system. Squint hard enough and you’ll also see an example of marketers using third party personal data, which is a bit more controversial than it once was.

For broader trends in tech deals, Hampleton Partners’ reports that 61% of digital marketing M&A spending last year was on services compared with just 39% on software. Biggest acquirers were agencies like Dentsu and Accenture. Also, private equity groups doubled their investment last year and were up 4x since 2015. Interesting.

Zaius, which combines a unified customer database with email and Web site marketing execution, has raised a $30 million Series B funding, bringing its total to $50.8 million. Zaius calls itself a “B2C CRM”: it allows some CDP-style access to its data but its focus is on providing an integrated marketing system.

Velocidi imports customer data from online advertising, in-house, and third party sources; builds a unified database; and delivers segments to Web site, email, advertising, and other delivery systems. It’s probably more DMP than CDP although you’d need a close look at the technical details to decide. In any case, they just bought Portugal-based ShiftForward, which does similar work in a private cloud. They’re now calling themselves a “private CDP” to highlight the change.

CDP mParticle has joined mobile martech vendors AppsFlyer, Braze, and Amplitude to create a OpenGDPR, a public API specification for responding to subject data requests. In plainer English, the companies have built a way for different systems to cooperate at finding data about an individual, which is needed to comply with the new European Union GDPR privacy regulation. They hope others will adopt their framework as a standard. The goal is to make compliance easier – without a shared framework, it could be nightmarishly difficult.

Oracle has added real-time streaming Web analytics (Oracle Infinity) and advanced audience segmentation (Oracle CX Audience) to its CX Cloud. Descriptions of both products tout customer data unification across silos, although CX Cloud already has a separate Customer Data Management Cloud that builds and exposes a consolidated master profile. There’s also the Data Cloud, their Data Management Platform (DMP) that includes both known and anonymous identities.

Here’s something that’s easier to understand: DemandJump has raised a $6 million Series A, bringing total funding to $8.6 million. They help retailers identify their best Web traffic sources by applying advanced attribution to a database that combines internal data with competitive intelligence.

Even TV buying is more complicated than it used to be. Nielsen has launched an Enterprise Audience API that lets media companies import their own audiences and match them against Neilsen ratings data to estimate how well specific media plans will reach those audiences. This isn’t targeting individuals but does make it easier to target more precise audience segments.

Predictive marketing vendor 6sense has acquired account based marketing platform (and CDP) ZenIQ. The deal continues 6sense’s expansion into marketing execution. Financial details were not announced.

Response to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony was generally positive, or at least that he hadn’t made things worse for Facebook. Perhaps the ultimate measure is that the stock price rose.

Several readers have expressed concern for Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern who was reprimanded last week for publishing without permission. He’s fine, folks. To show there’s no hard feelings we’ve let him submit this study from retail email specialist Bluecore. Key findings included that buyers are interested in products they’ve looked at before and that they like price decreases. Some other, less obvious data here as well.