CDP Institute

Let’s talk local marketing. eRelevance is a “marketing automation service” whose staff uses proprietary technology to run retention and upsell programs for small business clients. The company just took $5.1 million more funding, bringing its total to $13.7 million since 2013. With nearly 800 customers and $4 million annual run rate, it costs about $5,000 per year: reasonable but still more than many small businesses will spend.

Empyr uses geo-fenced advertising to make offers to people near a store. But its real differentiator is connecting ads to in-store purchases. It does this by offering consumers rewards for registering their credit cards, serving those consumers ads on partner Web sites, and charging retailers a fee when the consumers make a purchase. Part of the trick is deep integration with the credit card companies to gather the purchase data.

Reveal Mobile also assembles permission-based local audiences, in its case by gathering mobile device signals through public beacons, GPS, and wifi networks. It recently launched a new platform, Social Direct, that lets marketers select audiences based on location, including visits to their own store or a competitor, as well as broad interest categories. Marketers can then target those audiences on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google AdWords, and other channels.

SimpleReach has built a niche business in assembling information about marketing content consumption, calling itself a “content data platform” although it doesn’t use the initials CDP. Data gathered by the system is used to by publishers and marketers to create a unified view of content distribution. The company just announced $13 million in funding, bringing its total to $24 million.

CELUM manages content creation, management, distribution, and monetization. Its core business is digital asset management but it has just added project management and a content marketplace that lets creators and marketers buy, sell, and share content. They call the extended offering a Content Productivity Platform, which would be CPP if they used the abbreviation. Which they don’t.

Rubrik offers a “Cloud Data Management platform”.  That sounds super-sexy but is mostly about boring things like data backup and copy management. On the other hand, they just raised $180 million in Series D at $1.3 billion valuation. That’s sexy in its own way.  No, they don’t call it a CDMP.

Adtech vendors keep trying to profit from industry turmoil. Ad inventory marketplace Adfresco is a good example: trading on concerns about fully-automated ad buying, they now position their service as “bringing the human aspect back to automated buying and selling”. In concrete terms, this means that publishers can post inventory options online with a link to an account executive or sales team that must be contacted to make an actual purchase. Charmingly retro. I wonder if they offer drone-based martini delivery.

Privacy is another spot of troubled water where adtech vendors are fishing. AppNexus has announced an initiative to ensure compliance with privacy rules imposed by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Not breaking the law isn’t usually a differentiator, but so many companies are lagging in GDPR preparation that it could well turn out to give AppNexus an advantage.

Advertisers might be dragging their feet on privacy, but fraud has their full attention. Here we have programmatic platform AcuityAds announcing a partnership with Fraudlogix to expand protection. AcuityAds says they currently block 27% of all digital inventory due to fraud and quality issues. Yikes.

In an exceptionally jargon-filled release, BloomReach appears to be announcing integration of its recently-acquired Hippo content management system with BloomReach’s AI-driven recommendation tools. The combined system ingests data from all sources to create a unified customer view, analyzes purchases and content consumption, and drives messaging across all digital channels.

Marketers using tools like BloomReach need to do a better job of giving customers what they really want, according to an IBM study. The key finding is that executives think consumers want digital tools to give greater control and self-service, while consumers really want tools that save time and money. Another IBM report pans companies’ current customer experience offerings, noting for example that 71% of firms offer only generic, non-personalized marketing messages.

For a broader picture of consumer behavior, we have a study from market research firm PQ Media, which found total media usage has reached seven hours per day worldwide and ten hours per day in the U.S. Mobile media are growing fastest while desktop usage is declining.