CDP Institute

More good news: ad exchange OpenX reported that more than 50% of top publishers had adopted the ads.txt standard, which prevents fraud by listing companies that are authorized to sell their digital inventory. Ads.txt was developed by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and launched last May, so this is very fast adoption.

It goes without saying that building customer trust is essential for any company doing business online. Alas, it also often goes without doing. Email analytics vendor 250ok found that almost 90% of major online retailers don’t take basic steps to protect their customers from phishing attacks (where someone else sends an email claiming to be from the vendor to trick them into revealing personal information). Yikes!

More maltreatment: CRM vendor SuperOffice found that 62% of customers didn’t response to a customer service email. Just 20% answered questions on the first try while only 3% followed up to see if the customer was satisfied with their response.

Some better news: Google last week announced they’re making it easier for consumers to block retargeting ads. At least, that’s good news for consumers. Marketers might think otherwise.

Customer Data Platform and personalization vendor Evergage has purchased the MyBuys retail offer targeting business from online advertising company Magnetic. MyBuys merged with Magnetic in 2015. Evergage plans to move MyBuys customers onto the Evergage platform. It’s unusual to see one personalization company buy another. Sign of an overcrowded market, perhaps?

Web experience analytics company ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series C, bringing total funding to $62 million. ContentSquare captures individual-level Web site behaviors and supports testing of alternative Web experiences. It works with only anonymous profiles.

More money for analytics: marketing measurement expert Origami Logic has raised $15.2 million in a Series D, making their total $64.5 million. Origami Logic assembles data from all sources into dashboards and visualizations.

Lots of real news today. Start with a $2.4 billion acquisition by SAP of Callidus Software, which offers cloud-based sales performance management and configure-price-quote systems. Readers of a certain age will recall that Callidus bought early B2B marketing automation vendor LeadFormix back in 2012. The deal beefs up SAP’s sales automation products.

Another, much smaller acquisition: artificial intelligence vendor Conversica, which offers a virtual sales assistant for simple conversations, has purchased Intelligens.ai, a Chilean firm specializing in Spanish-language conversations. Interesting on several levels: the importance of training data, expansion into South America, and how far companies will go for AI talent.

Closer to home for customer data specialists: personal data discovery vendor BigID has raised a $14 million Series A, bringing total funding to $16.1 million. BigID finds personal information in corporate systems and maps items related to the same individual without copying the data into a central database. This helps to comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR but it doesn’t create a unified profile for marketing or other uses.

Yesterday was Data Privacy Day. I hope you have a great party but will understand if you don’t post pictures. Meanwhile, Cisco last week reported that 65% of companies have seen a delayed sale due to privacy concerns, with an average delay of nearly two months. Companies with more mature privacy processes reported shorter delays. They were also less likely to have suffered a privacy breach. In other words, strong privacy is good business.

If you think it’s hard to measure the value of data privacy, try measuring the value of good customer experience. According to survey vendor Confirmit, just 20% of companies do well at measuring the Return on Investment of their customer experience programs. Poor data integration and low management support were the biggest roadblocks to CX success.