CDP Institute

Remember yesterday’s comment about industry-specific systems for customer data? Trilliant Health’s announcement of a unified data and CRM platform for hospital and health system data came too late to include. But I’m mentioning it now to reinforce the point.

One question haunting the CDP industry is what happens when enterprise tech vendors start offering data unification. It hasn’t happened so far but last week did see new connectors between Salesforce CRM data and several Google products: Google Analytics 360, the BigQuery database, Google AdWords, and DoubleClick Bid Bid Manager. They’re first fruit of a partnership announced last year. If Google builds more connectors and adds core CDP functions such as identity resolution, this could get interesting.

Another alternative to standard CDPs is industry-specific products with native connectors to operational systems. Vizergy, which offers travel Web sites that integrate with reservation systems, already loads and unifies customer data. It just launched TargetingHub to analyze that data and assign customers to segments. Vizergy also throws in 140 predefined campaign ideas to help marketers use the results.

Hungry for your daily dose of GDPR? Chew on this: SDK management vendor SafeDK found that 56% of mobile apps include at least one SDK that accesses location, which is considered private data. Many also read lists of installed apps (42%) and contacts (29%), and 10% access the microphone. The study found the average mobile app includes 18.5 SDKs. You’ll find plenty more SDK trivia to liven up that Super Bowl party.

Advertising audience compiler Eyeota has completed a $12.5 million in Series B funding. Eyeota manages 3.5 billion audience profiles from around the world. The company’s total funding is $20.5 million.

Speaking of data, dynamic creative vendor Jivox has integrated real-time, local weather data from IBM-owned The Weather Company. IBM has been pushing hard to make that data broadly available, so this isn’t especially newsworthy. But it’s worth being reminded that such data can be directly integrated into messaging decisions by companies like Jivox.

Some have feared that audience data would become unavailable once the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect this May. But panic is now being replaced by accommodation and even some optimism that companies can turn GDPR to their advantage. As part of that process, the OpenX advertising exchange has announced its own GDPR compliance and provided a resource center to help others in the industry make the adjustment. If you’re still confused by GDPR, this is a good place to start.

Customer engagement vendor Usermind has raised a $23.5 million Series C funding. Usermind assembles a unified customer profile by reading data directly from source systems, although it does keep a persistent copy of some portions. That puts it right on the border of CDP-land. It uses the data to orchestrate customer journeys.

B2B identity resolution vendor FullContact has acquired B2B data aggregator Mattermark. The deal will add information about four million companies and 20 million people to FullContact’s 15 million company, one billion person database.

The CDP Institute has published a draft list of features to use in categorizing CDP vendors. The classification is an attempt to reduce confusion about what makes a CDP and how CDP vendors differ. Comments are welcome.

There’s already been plenty of comment on Facebook’s plan to refocus the news feed on personal messages. My take is it’s a clever defensive move to relinquish power over public opinion before national governments grab the company to secure that power for themselves. After all, being nationalized is bad for business and Facebook’s only real purpose is to make money. As it should be.

News that Facebook is creating its own video chat device was mostly overshadowed by the news feed change. The most intriguing rumor is the device will include facial recognition software, potentially letting Facebook track every user behavior without any user effort. There’s no reason to think anyone at Facebook even realizes this could be problematic. But let’s not single out Facebook: voice recognition means that every voice-activated device from Apple, Amazon, Google, and others has the same Big Brother potential.