News
The Gist
- Solo CDP? BlueConic’s acquisition of Jebbit reflects a commitment to creating a single, integrated Customer Data Platform (CDP), enhancing data capture and customer profiling capabilities.
- Wake up, CDPs? The acquisition revitalizes the relatively quiet CDP industry, indicating a trend toward consolidations and comprehensive technology stacks.
- Jebbit's bag of capabilities. Jebbit’s tools will integrate with BlueConic’s CDP to provide advanced customer insights, supporting enhanced data segmentation and activation across channels.
BlueConic’s acquisition of Jebbit represents the Customer Data Platform (CDP) provider’s “commitment to the benefits of a single, integrated CDP.”
David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, shared those thoughts with CMSWire after news broke of the Boston-based CDP provider’s acquisition today of the first-party data-capture and experience-creation software used by marketers. BlueConic officials tout the combined companies as the first “operating system for customer data.”
“Expansion of its scope represents BlueConic doubling down on its commitment to the benefits of a single, integrated CDP,” Raab said. “This is a sharp contrast to vendors who argue that CDP functions should be built from separate components that work on a cloud data warehouse built outside of the CDP itself.”
Wake Up a Sleeping CDP Industry?
The acquisition also woke up a relatively quiet CDP industry on the acquisition side. According to the CMSWire CDP Market Guide, consolidations of the previous years seems to have slowed, with no major acquisitions reported and a static landscape, with most of the existing vendors staying active and independent.
“While the top firms have continued to grow, no dominant player has emerged, with the top five companies accounting for only 16% of the employees and 14% of the overall funding,” CMSWire researchers reported. “Yet throughout that, we have seen a consolidation of the customer data platform as a foundational piece of the technology stack driving the customer experience.”
Some recent acquisitions include:
- Cheetah Digital. Americas. Merged with CM Group in 2022.
- ContactLab. EMEA. Acquired by Growens in 2022.
- Ensighten. Americas. Acquired by CHEQ in 2022.
- Invenna. EMEA. Merged with Human Inference in 2023.
- Neodata. EMEA. Merged with Adabra to form Blendee in 2023.
- The Data Team. APAC. Acquired by Lentra in 2022.
Cheetah, Neodata and The Data Team have reorganized into the parent company or have shut down and are no longer providing CDP services.
According to the Customer Data Platform Institute’s January 2024 report on the industry, other big funding CDP news over the past year came recently from Simon Data, which recorded a $52 million Series D and Klaviyo, which was valued at $8.5 billion in its Initial Public Offering.
Other transactions included purchase of Easyence by mediarithmics; purchase of PUSHTech by Cendyn; and acquisitions of CrossEngage and Datatrics by Spotler Group. Only one firm, Whenwhyhow, dropped out of the industry altogether, according to Raab’s industry report.
Raab also noted in his interview with CMSWire that Bloomreach purchased Radiance Commerce in January (after his report went live), a conversational commerce vendor.
“Historically, acquisitions by CDP vendors are pretty rare,” Raab said. “Most don’t have a lot of cash for such things and are doing incremental enhancements to their products to ensure tight integration of any new features. The work to integrate an acquisition is often substantial, and probably not worth it unless you’re one of the really big, resource-rich companies like Salesforce.”
Related Article: CDP vs. DMP: What's the Difference & Which Is Best for Your Business?
What’s the BlueConic-Jebbit Technology Play?
According to the CMSWire CDP Market Guide, BlueConic is strong in customer data visualization, data segmentation and other many useful features. Its weaknesses include a complex setup, and its speed of development shows in bugs and complexity.
Cory Munchbach, CEO of BlueConic, said in a LinkedIn post that Jebbit is a “powerful data-capture and experience-creation software for marketers.” They intend to “redefine the martech stack of the future.”
With Jebbit, marketers can collect first-party data using interactive tools such as custom quizzes, surveys and lookbooks, facilitated by Jebbit’s no-code, AI-powered experience creator interface. This data, when integrated with the enterprise data stored in the BlueConic CDP, aims to provide enhanced customer insights. The resulting comprehensive profiles can be anonymized in the BlueConic Clean Room for further segmentation or activation across channels with partners, according to company officials.
“Our mission at Jebbit has always been to make digital experiences assumption-free by directly engaging people about their interests, motivations and preferences in an enjoyable, engaging, and value-driven way,” Tom Coburn, CEO and co-founder of Jebbit, said in a press release. “Every marketer strives to understand the multi-dimensional nature of their customer. With the power of BlueConic and Jebbit, users will be able to leverage diverse types of data and redefine the concept of a customer profile.”
Related Article: CDPs Uncovered: Integrations, AI and the Path Forward
What’s the Road Ahead for BlueConic-Jebbit?
Raab noted it’s not clear from today's news announcement whether BlueConic will do any serious technical integration with Jebbit. CDPs usually expand by adding predictive analytics, personalization and journey orchestration, he added.
“But,” he said, “BlueConic has already added all of those, as well as a data clean room. So this lets them grow by adding data capture features, which hasn’t previously been an area of competition among CDP vendors.”
According to Raab, building richer customer profiles by capturing “zero party” data directly from customers is becoming more important as privacy rules limit other data sources and consumers become more concerned about directly controlling the data they provide to companies.
“Of course, systems like Jebbit can feed data into any CDP,” Raab added. “So it will be interesting to see what benefits emerge from a tight integration of Jebbit’s data capture and BlueConic’s customer profiles.”
Raab also noted that Jebbit has $92 million in funding per Crunchbase and 103 employees per LinkedIn, compared with $26.6 million funding (pre-Vista Equity Partner buyout) and 179 employees at BlueConic.
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“So what you really see is that this is a VEP (Venture Equity Purchase) acquisition that was merged into a sister VEP company (BlueConic),” he said. “Presumably VEP is trying to build a larger firm that’s big and broad enough to take public or sell to another investor as a package.”
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