Pinterest has many new friends. Nielsen announced it will provide audience verification metrics for Pinterest mobile campaigns. Neustar MarketShare will measure the impact of Pinterest campaigns on online conversion, brand lift, in-store sales, and mobile app installs. And Acxiom announced it will match online and offline retail transactions with Pinterest ad campaign recipients in a privacy safe way.
Highspot’s software helps sales people find the best-performing content to offer their prospects. It’s a niche solution but a common problem. They just raised a $15 million Series B, bringing total funding to $24.6 million. Investors include Salesforce Ventures, which has been intriguingly active recently.
Blueshift creates personalized messages for email, Web sites, and mobile apps. It partners with several Customer Data Platform vendors to help assemble the unified profiles that drive those messages. The company just launched an “AI-Powered Cross-Channel Visual Journey Builder” that runs manually-designed campaigns but uses AI to decide when to add customers to each campaign and to personalize the choice of products and contents offered within campaign messages.
Just over one-third of marketers plan to either buy a new CDP (21%) or replace an existing one (13%) this year, according to this Optimove survey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t report how many have a CDP already in place, which would put the other values in perspective. It does seem that CDPs are a relatively low priority: they rank sixth on the list of new systems and eighth on the list of systems to replace.