Customer journey orchestration engine Thunderhead has announced a ThunderBay, an AI-driven platform that creates individual-level optimized cross channel journeys. The system deals with the interdependencies among events, history, time, and path which overwhelm conventional methods. All good, even though the press release includes a gratuitous swipe at “CDPs and their ilk.” Ilk?
One of the stories we’ve been chasing this year is growth of the B2B data market. Here’s another episode: ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg, has filed for a $500 million Initial Public Offering. The S-1 shows $293 million revenue in 2019 and a $84 million loss, due mostly to $102 million interest expense on $1.2 billion in long term debt.
Retail is another industry supported by several specialist CDPs. Speaking of retail (see how I did that?), this enVista study finds big gaps between the personalization that retail shoppers want and the personalization they’re getting. For example, 74% of shoppers want personalized promotions and discounts but just 35% of retailers have implemented that successfully. Consumers are much less enthusiastic about suggested selling based on social media activity (31%) but almost as many retailers provide it (24%).
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.