One CDP trend we watch is systems for vertical markets. As a CDP for sports, entertainment, and membership businesses, Umbel fits nicely. They’ve just launched a “digital sponsorship suite” that makes it easier for franchises to sell sponsorships by gathering data from fans and sending them targeted advertising. Speaking of trends, Umbel’s combination of database building, analysis, and messaging clearly marks it as software for marketing departments, not an enterprise-run resource.  This is something we’ve been discussing on the Customer Experience Matrix blog.

Now I remember why this has been sitting in my queue for two weeks: Juniper Networks announced a fascinating survey on business and consumer attitudes towards “digital cohesion” but didn't release the 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.)