CDP Institute

A Customer Data Platform can help build those unified customer profiles. But even a CDP needs to be fed data. That’s where Narrative comes in: it provides a marketplace for data owners to sell their data to whoever needs it. Interesting concept. They’ve just partnered with cross-device identity expert Adbrain, which says it has mapped devices and locations to 90% of the U.S. adult internet population.

Other folks sell data too. For example, Equifax has all sorts of credit and financial information. They’ve just unified their offerings into something called Equifax Data-Driven Marketing. Scope includes data, unification, analytics, targeting, and measurement.

Attribution is a critical investment priority for nearly one-quarter of companies (23.9%) that responded to a survey by the Data & Marketing Association. Nearly two-thirds (62.5%) said it had become more important in the past year. The report also shows a continued shift in funds from offline to online marketing channels…no surprise there.

More surprising, a survey from Televerde finds that 80% of B2B sales professionals feel they and their company marketing teams are either aligned (62%) or very aligned (18%). The apocalypse is near.

Since we’re looking at the sales process today, let’s finish with a study from the Content Marketing Institute about buyers’ content preferences. They most want information related to their specific needs and product/service specifications.  Testimonials and case studies were less useful.  Nearly all buyers start their research before talking to vendors.

B2B data compiler ZoomInfo has been purchased by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. It continues a trend of marketing technology vendors being purchased by private equity firms, although Great Hill hasn’t been particularly active in the martech space. Price was not disclosed.

Why compile B2B data when you can just grab it from LinkedIn? That was the logic behind hiQ Labs’ business, which does analytics based on the public portion of LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn sued to stop them, citing anti-hacking laws, but, a U.S. District Court ruled in hiQ’s favor. The basic logic was that anything not protected by a password is fair game. Expect an appeal.

Then again, some companies can’t even protect their data from their own employees. Uber’s lax security policies led to a 2014 data breach, and has now settled with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s required to implement a comprehensive privacy program, submit to 20 years of data audits, and not misrepresent how it protects consumers’ personal data.

Interactive B2B content platform SnapApp has closed a $10.2 million Series B funding, bringing total funding to $22 million. SnapApp content captures user behavior and data but doesn’t make much use of external information in managing what’s presented.

Here’s some real data-driven personalization: Jivox dynamically generates personalized programmatic ads based on all sorts of inputs and machine learning.. They’ve just teamed with plista to extend their scope to native advertising, which inserts content recommendations within editorial settings. plista has its own data-driven recommendation engine as well as a publisher network.

Of course, all discussions of customer data come back to Facebook, Amazon, Google, and the handful of other mega-aggregators.

Appboy assembles customer data and executes cross-channel campaigns as customers move through different lifecycle stages. They’re big, processing more than 750 million active users per month. They’re getting bigger, having just raised a $50 million Series D, bringing total funding to $95 million. They’re getting more open, having recently announced connectors to feed data to Customer Data Platforms mParticle and Segment, as well as Amplitude and Amazon Redshift.