Well, that was a fun day. It started with news that CDP vendor Boxever is being bought by digital experience platform Sitecore. It’s the latest CDP acquisition by a company wanting to unify its collection of digital experience systems. Sitecore announced in January that it planned to spend $1.2 billion to its grow its business.
We also had a definitive announcement from Google that once it stops allowing third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, it also won’t accept similar-functioning replacements. Specifically, Google won’t build individual-level profiles based on browsing behavior. The move will favor publishers who collect huge stores of first party data, such as, well, Google.
CDP BlueVenn has been purchased by Upland Software, which owns a cluster of customer engagement products including Adestra, Kapost, PostUp, and Localytics. The company expects BlueVenn to unify and share data across all its systems. Price was $52 million, a modest 3.5x BlueVenn’s reported revenue of $15 million. It’s the latest of several CDP acquisitions by firms planning to connect separate customer engagement products.
Digital advertising platform PubMatic’s new partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, will enable the delivery of AI-powered cohort modeling to advertisers. Using a distributed AI model developed by Resolve, the collaboration aims to generate privacy-compliant audience segments across multiple publishers simultaneously. Not only does the targeting not rely on third party cookies, it also eradicates the need for user data to be moved or shared during the ad buying process.