CDP Institute

Remember when Walmart was the evil empire destroying small businesses across America? Today the $500 billion behemoth has somehow morphed into a spunky underdog fighting Amazon.com ($136 billion revenue). One dimension to the duel is pricing, where Amazon continues to undercut Walmart’s core promise of being cheaper than anyone else. This new study from Profitero finds that Amazon underpriced Walmart in 12 of 13 categories, although the average difference is just 3%. Walmart still beats the prices of other retailers.

Walmart may be on the defensive with prices, but it’s attacking on other fronts. Here’s a piece about its effort to grow its advertising business, leveraging its massive history of online and offline customer purchases. Amazon is growing its advertising revenues as well, although it’s still far behind Facebook and Google. Other major retailers are also using their customer data and Web reach to sell ads.

Amazon, in turn, keeps attacking physical retailers’ advantage in convenience.

Siftery builds a database of which companies use which products, built with information that community members submit about their companies. It has several services that leverage this information to help buyers decide what to purchase based on what similar companies are doing. The latest is addition looks for changes in members’ product stacks and deduces which products most often replace other products. It’s an interesting shortcut but shouldn’t replace the hard work of understanding your requirements and product capabilities.

Then again, why struggle to pick different products when you can buy one suite that does it all?

When it comes to picking ad buying systems, the software is less important than the data it can access. That’s the moral of this Digiday report that Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) is now tied with Google among ad buying agencies. Amazon’s software isn’t especially great but it has exclusive access to Amazon’s data on individual consumers’ shopping history. Low price and self-service options also weigh in Amazon’s favor.

Customer Data Platform vendor Amperity, which launched its product just last month, has closed a $28 million Series B funding. The new round brings total funding to $37 million. Amperity was founded in 2016.

CDP vendor Segment announced Personas, a new feature that lets users define calculations that assign customers to audience segments or create traits such as favorite product category. Calculations draw on unified customer profiles built by Segment; audiences and traits can be automatically shared with 200+ systems through existing Segment connectors. Personas will be rolled out during 2018.

B2B predictive analytics vendor Infer has been sold to ESW Capital, which will fold it into ESW’s Ignite Technologies affiliate. Infer assembles business profiles by scanning the Web for news and company information, and combines these with clients’ own marketing automation and CRM data. ESW is on a martech buying spree, having also purchased Infobright DB, Jive, ThinkVine, Placeable and FirstRain in the past year.

We saw last Friday that Tylenol is eager to let you know they’re watching your every move. The folks at Acxiom-owned LiveRamp are more discreet even though their ambition is broader: nothing less than a “universal, people-based identifier” to track people across all devices in all media. They’ve just made their IdentityLink IDs available to ad agencies, completing a plan that has already made them available to brands, technology platforms, data owners, and publishers.

Of course, a truly complete view of each customer takes more than buying some data from LiveRamp. To give an idea of the challenge: a CMO Council survey for SAP Hybris found just 23% of marketing leaders have a comprehensive view of customer data from across their organization. Lack of actionable insights from data and analytics was the number one roadblock to delivering a seamless customer experience.

We can’t discuss customer data without mentioning privacy.