Another alternative to standard CDPs is industry-specific products with native connectors to operational systems. Vizergy, which offers travel Web sites that integrate with reservation systems, already loads and unifies customer data. It just launched TargetingHub to analyze that data and assign customers to segments. Vizergy also throws in 140 predefined campaign ideas to help marketers use the results.
Adobe has released a connector that lets its Adobe Campaign system read Hadoop data directly. It’s intriguing on more levels than I can discuss here. Let’s just note Adobe’s blog comment that this lets Campaign access raw Hadoop data “without complex data migrations and transformations” as if they weren’t important.
Some have feared that audience data would become unavailable once the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect this May. But panic is now being replaced by accommodation and even some optimism that companies can turn GDPR to their advantage. As part of that process, the OpenX advertising exchange has announced its own GDPR compliance and provided a resource center to help others in the industry make the adjustment. If you’re still confused by GDPR, this is a good place to start.
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.)