CDP Institute

More CDP industry news: mParticle announced a $35 million Series C funding and released an identity management engine called ID Sync. ID Synch is intriguing because it focuses on controlling which aspects of identity are presented in different situation. See this blog post for details. mParticle total funding is now $76 million.

Immuta isn’t a CDP: it builds unified, accessible databases for been intelligence analysts, not marketers. The company just released a product targeted at data scientists in general. Its sophisticated controls over data access and privacy protection are an interesting benchmark for marketers and CDP systems.

Customer Data Platform vendor BlueConic has released a CDP readiness self-assessment tool. After answering four questions, respondents are told their company’s maturity level and given a list of use cases that are appropriate to their situation. Nice!

BlueConic doesn’t recommend specific products based on your answers, but that’s exactly what Siftery does. It looks at what products are used at your company and at similar companies and suggests products you might want to add. Artificial intelligence is involved.

Siftery’s premise is that companies are using the right systems.

U.S. and UK marketers will spend $34 to $40 billion on technology this year, or roughly 16% of their budgets, according to advertising industry research firm WARC.

Has martech grown because of venture funding, or did funding create martech growth? Presumably, both. In any event, Braavo Capital offers an alternative to conventional financing, making credit available to mobile app developers based on customer behaviors captured by the apps themselves. It also taps into existing revenue sources for automated repayment. The company just closed it own $70 million financing, the old fashioned way.

Mobile marketing automation platform Swrve also raised its $25 million Series D from conventional sources. Swrve gathers mobile data through its own SDK and can connect to other sources.  It also exposes the data to external systems. So we could call them a Customer Data Platform, even though they don’t.

Today’s lesson: Personalization is cool but omni-channel personalization is even cooler. Exhibit A is Iterable, which has expanded the reach of its “growth marketing platform” with connectors for direct mail, web push, rich content mobile push and Facebook and Instagram Custom Audiences. Iterable’s core functionality is to send segments and personalized messages to external systems for delivery. It works with any type of data but doesn’t manage a unified database on its own.

Next up: Evergage, which does real-time personalization for Web sites and mobile apps. They’ve added triggered emails to the mix. Everage does build and expose its own database, making a true Customer Data Platform.

Finally there’s e-Spirit, a Web content management system that became an omni-channel “digital experience hub”. They just announced an “intelligent content engine” that creates personalized messages by first building a unified customer database and then generating audience segments and product and content recommendations as inputs.

Amperity, which has been in not-very-quiet stealth mode for over a year, has formally unveiled its “intelligent customer data platform”. As you’d expect, it builds unified customer databases using machine learning and a large-scale distributed data architecture on Microsoft Azure. The big innovation appears to be probabilistic rating of the matches found by its identity resolution engine, so customers take use tighter or looser standards depending on how important it is in a particular situation to be certain that matches are correct. The company raised $9 million in February 2016.