Rejecting shareholder demands that it divest Segment, Twilio announced a plan to continue selling it as a stand-alone product, integrate it more closely with its other offerings, increase growth, and cut costs. New layoffs are almost sure to follow, on top of a 25% company-wide staff reduction in the past two years. The company reports that Segment lost $72 million in 2023, despite 7% revenue growth to $295 million.
While advertisers continue to rely heavily on third-party cookies for programmatic ad buys, they are slowly preparing for the cookieless future. 33Across reports investment in cookie alternatives within its ad exchange grew an average of 9% in Q4 2023 compared with the previous quarter. Retail advertisers invested 26% of their budget in cookie alternatives during the period, more than double the share of one year ago.
Openprise, which now calls itself a Revenue Data Operations platform but qualifies as a CDP, has raised a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding to $58 million. Revenue Operations, if you haven’t been keeping up with your industry buzzwords, supports marketing, sales, and service organizations. This Openprise survey on the topic found just 9% of RevOps professionals were very satisfied with their data.
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.)