CDP Institute

The opposite of people-based marketing is content marketing, which markets to anyone interested in a particular topic even if you don’t know their identity. If privacy regulations and other changes make identification harder, you can expect content marketing to grow. That’s presumably the logic behind Sphere, Outbrain’s new, invitation-only network of publishers who will offer their content to each other’s audiences. It’s also positioned as a way for marketers to escape the walled gardens.

Many U.S. businesses are closed today so we’ll focus today on news from elsewhere. We’ll start with an announcement from UK (and U.S.)-based CDP vendor BlueVenn that they’ve added a range of data marketing services to help clients apply of BlueVenn technology. The services draw on the LEAP marketing agency that BlueVenn purchased in January.

Also from Britain, 34% of respondents to media agency 7stars’ consumer poll said they would exercise their “right to be forgotten” under GDPR, which would require companies to erase the consumers’ data. Take this with a grain of salt, since 75% admitted they don’t understand GDPR in the first place. Better news: 32% of consumers said they’d trust brands more with their data as a result of GDPR. (Data as reported by Computer Weekly; I couldn’t find an online copy of 7stars survey itself.)

Finally, Adobe and Econsultancy have just released the 2018 edition of their long-running and always-insightful Digital Trends report.

Everybody loves funding announcements! CDP vendor Fospha just raised $7.3 million.

Fospha has recently been selling itself in part as a GDPR compliance tool. It should be an effective pitch: data modeling vendor Erwin found just 6% of enterprises say they’re fully prepared for the GDPR deadline of May 25. But the survey also suggests the GDPR solutions must be sold outside of marketing: 36% said IT alone is responsible for meeting data regulations and 55% said IT and business units share responsibility.

Master data management vendor Semarchy also found that IT rather than business users are primarily responsible for data governance. Customer data was the most common focus for master data projects, but more had goals related to customer service, experience, and loyalty (29.8%) than sales and marketing (25.5%). Other factoids: 40% of respondents take longer than six months to implement a new domain such as customer data and fewer than 20% update their master data at least daily.

You were less interested than expected in Tuesday’s batch of CDP vendor news, Dear Reader. But I’ll continue to report on such things. Here’s an announcement that mParticle has added a batch of new features to help companies comply with GDPR rules for consent management and data requests. They’re among many (well, several) CDP vendors who are positioning themselves as partial solutions to GDPR requirements.

On the other hand, you were more interested than I expected in last week’s news about Acxiom splitting into data and services divisions. So maybe you’ll also be excited to hear that Acxiom’s LiveRamp is acquiring B2B data compiler Pacific Data Partners. The move extends LiveRamp’s cross-channel identity resolution to include B2B contacts. This is actually kind of a big deal.

And while we’re reporting on vendor acquisitions: personalization vendor Windsor Circle has been bought by OSG, which adds marketing messages to invoices, billing statements, and similar communications. Windsor Circle builds customer profiles using eCommerce data but no one has ever called them a CDP.

If you’re expecting some cutesy Valentine’s Day theme today, you’re reading the wrong newsletter.

That Winterberry report was a relatively long 35 pages, but it’s a greeting card compared with the 177 page behemoth the IAB just published on the 21st Century Brand Economy. Their central point is that brands will interact directly with consumers, removing many barriers that formerly protected market leaders from competition. IAB supports, or maybe undercuts, its argument by noting that non-store sales grew from under 4% of retail in 1992 to 9.4% in 2015. Success will require direct marketing skills, trust-building, smarter ad buys, and lots of data.