CDP Institute

It’s Valentine’s Day, right? And Valentines Day is all about relationships, just like the customer data in CDPs is about relationships. So shouldn’t we really call it CDP Day? Or, at least, cover CDPs in today’s newsletter?  Let’s start with TagCommander, a Paris-based CDP that has just renamed itself Commanders Act.  The aim is to clarify that they’re now much broader than just tag management. The system now has modules for cross-identity data unification, attribution, and segmentation as well as tag management.

CDP vendor mParticle has been building lots of its own relationships.  The latest is a Roku integration that lets it capture user behaviors and content consumption within native Roku apps.  It can then integrate these with other customer data. mParticle has also recently announced deals with Pinterest, Snapchat, and comScore. I wonder if they’re juggling multiple dates tonight.  

The thing about relationships is both parties must consent or it’s just plain stalking.

The distinction between social media and paid advertising is too clear, said no one ever. Doing its part to keep the waters muddy, social media management platform Hootsuite recently purchased social media ad campaign platform AdEspresso. Hootsuite had already partnered with AdEspresso and five other social advertising platforms last October to let marketers manage social media campaigns from within Hootsuite. AdEspresso itself goes beyond mere campaign management to automatically generate thousands of ad variants, test them, and optimize the results.

Spotad also automatically manages online ad campaigns, although its specialty is optimizing programmatic buying of mobile ads. It does this by analyzing broad market data and advertisers’ own marketing data to figure out the best time to run ads for a target demographic. Using artificial intelligence, of course. The Israel-based company just raised $3.5 million Series A and moved itself to China, the better to grow in that market.

Speaking of mobile ads in Asia, Mobilewalla has added its 400 million devices to the BlueKai Marketplace in the Oracle Data Cloud. It offers more than 100 demographic, behavioral, and intent-based segments in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. You’ll notice that China isn’t on the list, except for Hong Kong.

Head down the right stairway in the right alley in any big city and you’ll find a bar full of martech geeks listening to blues music and hotly debating the definition of Customer Data Platforms.

Of course, you won’t really find a bar full of people arguing about CDPs.

If this bar is any good at all, at least one TV will be showing the Drone Racing League, which launched year and now has sponsors including Bud Light, Toy State, and the German insurer Allianz. This has almost nothing to do with CDPs, although there’s sure to be a customer database of league fans somewhere. I just think it’s cool there’s a Drone Racing League.

This isn’t a news item but still an interesting interview about how Target uses first party data to inform media buys by agency and vendor partners.

Stealth-cloaked artificial intelligence project ADEXT popped out of the void to acquire formerly-Mexcio-City-based automated advertising platform MyCampaign / MiCampaña.com.

Marchex ties phone calls to the advertisements that generated them and to the resulting revenue. Or, as they put it, they offer an “omnichannel analytics cloud”. They’ve just added Facebook ads to their sources. Given the increasing role played by Facebook in advertising strategies, it’s kind of a big deal. But remember this is only tracking calls triggered by Facebook ads, not other Facebook activities. So there’s still a lot of missing information.