CDP Institute

Here’s a simpler story: DigSite will deliver consumer reactions to proposed products, ad concepts, graphic designs, and such in 24 hours. The company assembles online consumer groups, presents materials, gathers reactions, and analyzes the results. DigSite carefully avoids the term “focus group” but that’s what it sounds like to me. They previously turned around their projects in one week but have now streamlined their process.

A survey by personalization vendor Monetate found that just 6% of respondents have deployed advanced personalization, compared with 56% who are working on it, 28% who are just starting out, and 10% who aren’t doing anything.

Data exchange platform MuleSoft filed last Friday for a $100 million Initial Public Offering. Mulesoft provides a type of integration by shuttling data between appilcation systems.  This makes it somewhat competitive with Customer Data Platforms, although it doesn’t create a persistent database or unified customer view. As it happens, CRM vendor Pegasystems announced a MuleSoft integration the day before the IPO announcement. This will make it easier for Pega to access external data.

In more current news, social media management vendor Hootsuite today announced acquisition of social media measurement vendor LiftMetrix. The synergy is fairly obvious. LiftMetrix connects paid, owned, and earned social campaigns to conversions, leads, and sales, allowing Return on Investment analysis. It also auto-tags content, tracks brand mentions, benchmarks against competitors, recommends campaign improvements, and stores data for external analysis.

Semarchy does master data management, meaning it unifies and standardizes all kinds of data, including customer identities.

Nuance is best known for the speech recognition technology which powers automated telephone customer service systems.

TouchCR is a just-launched Salesforce AppExchange app that can gather data from all Salesforce.com products to build a unified customer profile, append external data, and then produce reports and segmentations including enhanced RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) scores. The segments and scores can be fed to external systems to use in campaigns.  According to TouchCR, it’s the first system to unify data from all the Salesforce clouds. It doesn’t appear to integrate non-Salesforce data.

Venture funding for marketing technology nearly doubled from $7.96 billion in 2015 to $14.05 billion in 2016, according to the Investscape 2016 from MarTech Advisor. The largest deal was $2.5 billion invested by Koch Brothers in Infor; that deal single-handedly made the platform/suite category that largest fund recipient for the year. Other top-funded categories were internet services, mobile apps, and customer experience. Lots of company-by-company details here if you’re interested.

Let’s look at some companies outside the U.S. today.  We’ll start with Boxever, a Dublin-based Customer Data Platform and orchestration system that has specialized in the travel industry. The company has just repackaged its unification components as Boxever OneView and its orchestration tools as Boxever Engage. It’s part of a move to add retail and financial services clients. Packaging aside, the system capabilities are still pretty much as described in this recent review.on Customer Experience Matrix.

IOVOX is a London-based firm that captures telephone call data so companies can better analyze where calls are coming from and how they relate to marketing programs and sales results. Boring but important. The company just raised $10 million to finance entry into the U.S. market.

Closer to home, Toronto-based AdParlor develops social and video advertising technologies.

IT trade group CompTIA asked U.S. IT workers about technology acquisition and management at their organizations.