CDP vendor Stride has launched Engagement Engine, a tool that lets non-technical users build automated cross-channel campaigns. Stride, whose founders are Salesforce refugees veterans, has particularly close integration with Salesforce marketing and sales clouds.
6sense started as a predictive modeling platform but has reinvented itself as a tool for account based marketing orchestration, in part leveraging its intent data and in part by purchasing the ZenIQ ABM platform. Something must have worked, since they’ve just raised another $27 million, their first round since 2015. Total funding is now $63 million.
Connected TV means more than addressing individual consumers: it means consumers can buy things through their video device. Sure enough, this study from Telaria and Hulu shows that connected TVs are the medium of choice for buyers of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. DTC buyers spend 70% more time streaming TV than using social media and 80% of DTC shoppers think DTC brands give them a closer relationship than shopping on Amazon. Serving this market is another way that Publicis will benefit from Epsilon’s direct marketing heritage.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)