Conversational AI Provider Kore.ai partners with mParticle

Kore.ai and mParticle, announced a partnership to provide an AI-first natural language processing (NLP)-based search engine and intelligent chatbots to personalize retail shopping experiences. These tools will be powered with customer insights to improve service in areas such as purchases and support.

“Brands are increasingly realizing the power of personalization across the company, beyond marketing,” says mParticle Chief Product Officer Chee Chew. “Conversational AI has made great advances in understanding what a customer says. With the full 360 customer profile data and AI data platform that mParticle brings to this partnership, we will help conversational AI get the right answer for each individual customer.”

“Digital marketplaces are discovering the transformative power of conversational AI in enhancing the shopping experience through personalized customer interactions and product recommendations,” says Kore.ai CEO and Founder, Raj Koneru. “We are thrilled that Kore.ai and mParticle are joining forces to deliver personalized digital and voice chatbots that will provide an exceptional shopping experience to all customers, no matter their channel of choice.”

Kore.ai launched RetailAssist, a conversational commerce assistant solution for the retail industry at the National Retail Federation (NRF) show in New York City earlier this month. The solution can help ecommerce and retail companies build abilities around self-service automation, personalization, omnichannel fulfillment, and 24/7 pre-/post-sales service and support.

Lotame Introduces Data Platform, Spherical

Technology company Lotame, has introduced Spherical, a data platform that can help marketers and media owners quickly get value from both known and unknown first party data for customer engagement and acquisition.

The new platform allows for interoperability and data portability across media and brand owner tech stacks, bringing first party data that is kept in data warehouses and customer data platforms (CDPs) into the marketing/advertising ecosystem. Customer data can be brought together, modeled, enriched, and activated in faster and easier ways. At launch, Lotame had integrations with Blueconic, Meiro, mParticle, Rudderstack, Salesforce, Simon Data, Tealium, and Treasure Data.

Lotame Founder and CEO Andy Monfried announced the new product at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, saying, ““There’s no shortage of pain in our industry. Everyone wants first-party data but not everyone has it. Many that have it don’t know how to make the most of it. Preserving addressability and data connectivity are gridlocked by a host of macro and micro issues. Spherical was designed to address these sources of pain instead of myopically focusing on symptoms.”

Lytics Cloud Connect Integrates with Databricks Lakehouse

Lytics announced an integration with Databricks, a centralized repository for storing structured and unstructured data at any scale. Using the reverse extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution Cloud Connect, brands can now take customer data directly from Databricks Lakehouse and use it to make very specific segments in their existing ad networks. This helps to eliminate silos, which in turn can result in better insights to improve ROI.

“Businesses create and collect huge amounts of valuable data and data models in Databricks Lakehouses that often remain disconnected and underutilized when driving the most effective campaigns,” says Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, President, Lytics. “In today’s economic climate, it’s more important than ever to get more ROI from your strategic investments. Lytics Cloud Connect easily connects your investments in Databricks to the ROI you deserve in your marketing campaigns.”

The integration marks the fifth data source partner available for Cloud Connect.

Simon Data Launches Activate

Simon Data announced the launch of Simon Activate, a tool that unifies customer data from cloud data warehouses, as well as additional sources, allowing marketing teams to quickly and easily build advanced custom audiences. Companies can create actionable 360-degree customer views in days or weeks, helping to support personalization and optimize customer acquisition costs.

Simon Activate is built on Snowflake. “It was a deliberate decision to build Simon Activate on Snowflake and the greatest benefit we’ve seen is that it has allowed us to better integrate with CDWs in a way other CDPs/Martech tools that were built on legacy architecture cannot,” says Jason Davis, CEO, and founder of Simon Data. “Additionally, it has allowed us to build new products, such as Simon Activate, at speed as new customer needs and pain points arise.”

“Simon Data’s mission aligns with where we see the modern marketing data stack heading,” says Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake. “In 2023, marketers will face even more pressure to achieve higher ROI and deliver better customer experiences. It is critical to build a solid data foundation for your marketing engine. Simon Activate, Powered by Snowflake, provides simple, powerful capabilities that demonstrate what building your marketing stack on the Snowflake Data Cloud can unlock for joint customers.”

The Trade Desk Launches Galileo

Advertising technology company The Trade Desk introduced Galileo, a solution that supports advertiser first-party data activation. Galileo works with new cross-channel identity solutions, including Unified ID 2.0 (UID2).

Galileo helps advertisers to onboard and activate their first-party data quickly and easily using:

Seamless and direct onboarding integrations with all major customer relationship management (CRM), CDP, and other data and clean room providers, allowing advertisers to instantly begin matching audiences using UID2
Audience matching across all publishers, platforms, devices, and channels — including connected TV — which provides a true omnichannel identity environment
Reporting and measurement of identity matching and advertising performance

“We are at a tipping point for the open internet,” says Samantha Jacobson, Chief Strategy Officer, The Trade Desk. “The infrastructure of the internet is embracing new identity solutions built for today’s digital media consumption across different devices and apps, such as Unified ID 2.0. In doing so, they are creating the richest identity ecosystem we’ve ever experienced, and one that aims to put consumer privacy at the forefront. With Galileo, we will help the world’s major advertisers take advantage of this by unleashing the value of their most valuable customer data.”

As part of Galileo, The Trade Desk now has direct integrations with CRM, CDP, and clean room providers, including Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Habu, InfoSum, LiveRamp, Salesforce, and Snowflake.

CDP Research Released from Twilio, Tealium, and Treasure Data

Twilio Segment shared results from its Customer Data Platform Report 2023, that was based on trillions of application programming interface (API) data calls. The data showed that there has been strong growth in enterprise solutions, data warehouse usage, and consumer privacy.

“In 2023, brands are faced with conflicting demands: maximize customer retention, activate the product and customer data they are collecting, and do it all while increasing operational efficiencies. This report shows that CDPs are the key to meeting all of these challenges for a wide variety of organizations,” says Kevin Niparko, VP of Product Management at Twilio Segment. “In some cases that means using CDPs to leverage product and customer data in order to drive retention and growth. In other cases, it means increasing data efficiency by eliminating redundancies and streamlining their tech stacks. In all cases we’re seeing companies derive tremendous value from collecting, organizing, and acting on data in real-time.”

Specific data points include:

Data volume hit an all-time high in 2022, with a record 11.7 trillion API calls on the Twilio Segment platform.
Companies are seeking ways to increase the efficiency of their data stacks. Fifty-seven percent of marketing leaders believe they are currently spending money on ineffective tools.
Enterprise solutions showed strong growth, and the Twilio Segment platform has helped customers activate their data by connecting to more than 400 different SaaS apps. The most popular apps are Google Analytics (used by 67% of Twilio Segment customers), Mixpanel (51%), and Facebook Pixel (41%). In 2022, the fastest-growing app was June, a product analytics tool, posting 83% year-over-year growth.
Data warehouses were the second most popular destination for customer data in 2022, behind analytics apps and ahead of advertising apps. More than half (53%) of Twilio Segment customers send their customer data to a data warehouse.
In 2022, Twilio Segment successfully processed 23.4 million user data deletion requests, a 69% increase over 2021.

Tealium released its 4th Annual State of the CDP Report, a global survey of 1,200 IT, operations, marketing, and data and analytics leaders that showed 90% of companies investing in CDPs outperformed marketing objectives and are better positioned to navigate market uncertainty.

“This year’s survey told us a lot about the performance of organizations that have adopted CDPs in contrast to those that have not,” says Heidi Bullock, CMO at Tealium. “Those with a CDP have been able to achieve significantly more and remain more nimble with access to real-time, data-based insights, despite today’s market uncertainty.”

Related Article: CX Innovators: Heidi Bullock, Tealium

Specific data points include:

93% of companies were satisfied with their ability to create the most relevant and personalized customer experiences, with the top reasons businesses adopting a CDP in 2022 being customer retention, privacy and regulatory compliance, and customer acquisition.
95% of seasoned CDP users are confident in their CDP’s ability to support compliance, and 93% feel they can quickly adapt to new and evolving privacy regulations.
Those without a CDP stated cost savings as a top priority in 2023, focusing on retention, while more tenured CDP users focused on growth.
About 74% of companies with a CDP saw returns on investment (ROI) within the first year of usage. The survey also revealed that companies with the longest CDP tenure were the most confident with their ability to use data in a trusted way (93%), as opposed to those who have not adopted a CDP.

Additionally, Treasure Data announced results of a survey performed with martech decision-makers that focused on the current state of CDPs. The CDP Value Chain: From Baseline Uses to Business Transformation showed that enterprises are optimistic on CDP prospects going forward, with 99% of survey respondents expecting their CDP solutions to assume greater significance within the next two years.

“The rise of CDPs parallels the added importance of consumer data in marketing strategies and customer-centric initiatives,” says Zack Wenthe, CDP evangelist at Treasure Data. “CDPs have lived up to their initial promise of unifying data and orchestrating the customer journey all while demonstrating remarkable data privacy and governance. Treasure Data’s technology is now taking the next step by powering business transformation across the enterprise through innovative use cases.”

Specific data points include:

Marketing and sales teams see the most value from a unified customer data foundation. However, customer service, data science, operations, and executive teams also have a strong demand for and appreciation of data connectivity.
Data security and data privacy compliance were recognized as “very important” factors when evaluating CDPs (68% and 60%, respectively), ahead of more conventional CDP functions such as identity management and resolution (46%), integration with other technologies in the tech stack (61%), and the ability to scale with data needs (55%).
Forty percent of martech decision-makers indicated that their CDPs will help improve their first-party data ownership.
Half or more of martech decision-makers credit the following as current use cases: campaign personalization (59%), audience segmentation and targeting (56%), measuring marketing performance (51%), and identity resolution (50%).

Author Information

Sherril Hanson

As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.

She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.

Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.

CDP Updates: Kore.ai, Lotame, Lytics, mParticle, Simon Data, and The Trade Desk