CDP Institute

SnapLogic connects streams of data from one system to another.  It calls itself an integration platform, which is perfectly reasonable.  But it’s important (to us, at least) not to confuse the SnapLogic’s application-to-application connections with the central database constructed and shared by a CDP.  SnapLogic just raised $40 million to expand its business, bring its total funding to $136.3 million. 

This CDP Institute Blog post looks are four recent surveys related to customer data issues. All found companies doing omnichannel marketing programs without a unified customer database. But they also show that a shared, complete customer view is needed for optimal results.

Neustar, one of the leaders in building cross-channel customer identities, has launched a Data Directory make it easier for marketers to build custom audiences with Neustar and third party data. Scope is digital advertising across display, mobile, social, and interactive TV channels.

Are you less concerned with cross-channel identities than location-based targeting? Near, which provides real-time location information gathered from over a billion devices, has integrated its data with the Oracle BlueKai Marketplace.

Maybe you really care about intent data. RadiumOne tracks device-level behavior across channels, identifies intent, and delivers advertising. They just announced a “partner ecosystem” that integrates more than 70 products to expand the analytics and advertising capabilities available within its product. Customer Data Platforms on the list include Ensighten, mParticle, Segment, Tag Commander, and Tealium.

Customer Data Platform vendor mParticle has released a major upgrade that adds point-and-click integration to ingest data from many SaaS platforms.  This substantially increases the range of data the system can manage.  Initial integrations include Kochava, Apsalar, Adjust, Iterable, Urban Airship, MailChimp, Tune, and Zendesk.

Mobile-first marketing automation and loyalty platform SessionM has acquired LoyalTree, which provides integrated point-of-sale marketing software.  The prize is LoyalTree’s API, which will let SessionM deliver its omnichannel campaigns through point-of-sale systems from NCR, Oracle, POSitouch, and others.  Data will also flow back to SessionM to enrich its customer profiles and link marketing campaigns with in-store purchases. 

MarketsandMarkets has a new report predicting that emotion detection and recognition technologies will grow nearly 40% per year, to reach $36 billion by 2021. Scope includes facial expressions, speech, voice, and bio-sensing (ECG, eye tracking, wearable, etc.). This is a major new data source for marketers and their CDP systems, not to mention AI systems in general.

Usermind, which offers journey optimization on top of a unified customer database, announced it is opening its database to third-party analytics and visualization services.

Fishbowl is a customer engagement system for restaurants and Olo is a digital ordering system for restaurants.

If having execution systems that can use improved customer data is one big obstacle to making CDPs valuable, another is being able to actually generate enough different content versions to take advantage of all that precise targeting. Criteo is stepping into that gap, at least for digital advertising, with an ad creation technology that automatically generates contextually-optimized personalized ads tailored to users’ real-time shopping behavior. The company says its tests showed up to 15% higher sales. Note that “up to”.

Lotame is a powerful DMP (Data Management Platform) that targets anonymous individuals across channels and devices.