CDP Institute

Lots of research shows that IT leaders give low priority to marketing technology. But an Experian survey of CIOs suggests they at least do recognize the importance of customer data: it was the most common focus for data management efforts (77%), even beating out product data (61%) and financial data (57%). Almost half (44%) saw potential to monetize high quality data in the future. Other interesting insights here.

If customer data is the foundation of good marketing, then data quality is the foundation of good customer data. Data transformation vendor Paxata found that just 15% of IT executives said their companies had deployed a mature data quality approach, which they define as using things like data lakes, public cloud, and profiling. Another 40% had developed one but not deployed it. The IT organization was in charge of data quality at the vast majority of companies, with just 12% saying line of business managers had primary responsibility.

Putting things in a broader perspective, a survey from digital transformation consultants PointSource concluded that many companies are jumping into new technologies they don’t understand and without fixing their existing systems first.  CDP vendors take note: more than half said building a complete customer view involves accessing more systems than they’d like.

Lots of CDP and near-CDP news today. Let’s start with a “strategic initiative” between CDP RedPoint Global and enterprise preference manager PossibleNOW to cooperate on meeting some requirements of the GDPR privacy regulations. PossibleNOW provides the use interface and consent management while RedPoint connects with corporate data.

Next up is Segment, which we classify as a CDP but mostly moves data between systems. Given the cool $6.5 billion that Salesforce paid yesterday for data connector MuleSoft, Segment would probably prefer to list itself in that category. In any case, they just added the ability to move data into cloud data warehouse Snowflake, which will store it and process analytical queries from tools like Tableau and Looker.

Finally, we have news from Impact Radius, a mashup of three businesses including the Altitude (formerly ClearSaleing) attribution system, which assembles enough customer data to be thought of as a CDP. The other two businesses are Forensiq (ad fraud detection) and Radius (affiliate, influencer, and other paid partner marketing). That’s a pretty diverse collection but we’re told they have now been “natively integrated” into a “marketing technology platform” and the company has rebranded as just plain Impact.

Salesforce is spending $6.5 billion to purchase Mulesoft, which builds connectors to transfer data between systems. Salesforce positioned the deal as a way to “enable all enterprises to surface any data—regardless of where it resides—to drive deep and intelligent customer experiences throughout a personalized 1:1 journey.” Data connectors like MuleSoft differ from CDPs because they don’t build a persistent database of their own. See this blog post for a more nuanced reaction from CDP Institute CEO David Raab.

B2B-oriented CDP CaliberMind announced a $3.2 million funding round, bringing its total to $4.4 million. The funds will go to expand the product, marketing and sales.

CDP Optimove has added mobile messaging to its platform, making it a rare CDP with integrated message delivery functions. They added email capabilities last year.

CDP vendor Amperity announced general availability of its Databases functionality, which provides different customer views with different degrees of matching certainty. The system was previously available only to a small number of clients.

The Google/Facebook duopoly’s share of digital ad revenue may have peaked, according to eMarketer figures. They predict the two companies will capture 56.8% of the market in 2018, down from 58.5% in 2017. But don’t think of this as a victory for the little guy: Amazon and Snapchat are taking up the slack.

Facebook has more troubles on the political front: the latest is a planned French law that requires they remove hate content within 24 hours or pay fines up to $62 million per incident. A similar German law is already in effect. Further clarifying who’s in charge, the law would also use government resources to find offensive content and empower the government to shut down hateful accounts when the social network fails to act. Can you hear me now?