CDP Institute

Not to get all Grinchy on you, but adtech complexity has a big downside: it’s hard to know what’s actually happening. Here we have news that a Russia-based group has been taking in $3 to $5 million per day (that’s more than $1 billion per year) in fraudulent video advertising. This is on an entirely different scale from errors that Facebook has reported in its video viewing metrics – errors that don’t seem to be considered very important by the people paid to consider such things.

Here’s another adtech player likely to find a lump of coal in their stocking: Turn has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over its failure to stop tracking customers who tried to opt out. Specifically, when Verizon Wireless customers opted out of tracking, Turn deleted their cookies but still tracked them with mobile identifiers and on mobile apps. Oops.

Multi-channel personalization and recommendation vendor Dynamic Yield has raised $22 million in new funding, bringing its total to more than $36 million.  The system integrates with Web sites, mobile apps, email, and advertising channels.   Yes, it supports it all by building a unified customer view.

Ditto Labs provides a “vision as a service” API to tag photos with not just products and brand logos, but subjective things like sentiment and demographic profiles.  This makes social media photos vastly more useful for marketing.  They just announced a Series C investment round led by Red Fort Capital but didn’t say how much.

Purple Deck Media provides small business marketers with mobile apps and content management.  It has just added beacons and geofencing to its capabilities.   What’s interesting here is that they’re making advanced features available to small companies. 

Audience measurement giant Nielsen is acquiring Gracenote, which provides metadata (i.e., descriptions and tags) about TV shows, movies, music, and other content to program guides on TVs, connected devices, in-car entertainment systems, and online services. Nielsen’s announcement says it will tie the data into its audience measurement framework, enabling marketers to better target customers and optimize campaigns in real time. In other words, this is about adding still more information to customer profiles.

I’m skeptical of voice interfaces for complex interactions like data analysis, but Datorama apparently thinks Amazon Alexa is up to the task. They’re just announced an Amazon Alexa function called “Ask Datorama Anything” that gives access to the unified data assembled in Datorama’s Customer Data Platform. Voice commands can kick off reports and processes. Interesting.

BlueVenn combines a Customer Data Platform with journey management and personalization. Here’s a review from the Customer Experience Matrix.

Iterable assembles customer data from multiple sources and lets marketers use to define segments, create lists, and run outbound campaigns in email, text, mobile push, or in-app messages. That’s far from all channels – Web, anyone? – but more flat lists for email. It just raised $23 million to further its growth.

The market for augmented reality and virtual reality apps will grow more than 74% per year through 2020, according to research from Technavio. I expect marketers to combine these technologies with data to give customers a “personal reality” that is much nicer than the real world. And to sell them stuff.

We recently reported about Lotame measuring TV audiences with individual data from Smart TVs, even though advertisers still had to buy ads that reach everyone who views a show.  Here’s something similar from Adobe, which is using data from other devices to understand who’s watching.  Adobe’s “TV Media Management Platform” is also provides advanced forecasting to help media planning.  It’s always nice to see martech and adtech working together, if only so I can call it “madtech”.

Unlike most Data Management Platforms, Krux has expanded beyond anonymous cookies to build cross-channel identities with personally identifiable data such as customer records from CRM systems.