BlueConic’s acquisition of Jebbit is a match made in heaven – or in Boston, at least.
On Wednesday, customer data platform (CDP) BlueConic bought Jebbit, which creates quizzes, surveys and other interactive online plugs for collecting data from customers.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Both companies and their leadership teams have been well aware of each other for some time, BlueConic CEO Cory Munchbach told AdExchanger. They’re each based in Boston, have a local angel investor in common, and their founders knew each other from their days at Boston College.
CDP synergies
Aside from rooting for all the wrong sports teams, the two companies make sense together.
They court similar types of marketing clients – large, store-bought brands and retail operators – but have “different points of entry,” Munchbach said. Jebbit often deals with a brand’s web design and ecommerce team, while BlueConic is more aligned with the data center or part of a digital transformation program.
BlueConic and Jebbit did some joint marketing and client work in the past, since they share a handful of customers. It makes sense because the technologies are complementary. Jebbit collects front-end data from online users, for example, from a pop-up survey after a purchase, which becomes more valuable when fused with data BlueConic collects and warehouses, such as purchase data in a CRM or customer support system and call center data.
“That’s really the magic here,” Munchbach said.
C is for “competition”
CDPs are becoming larger, more holistic vendors as the category matures. But getting bigger and offering more services can be tricky for a CDP.
This is because the CDP category has a self-imposed rule about not buying media. A CDP can inform a media-buying platform – like feeding audience segments to a DSP – but doesn’t purchase ads itself.
Although acquiring Jebbit doesn’t push BlueConic into ad buying territory, it is part of an evolution among CDPs and other vendors, including verification services like IAS and DoubleVerify, that are inching closer and closer to outright ad buying.
But BlueConic isn’t getting into DSP territory at all, Munchbach said, at least not for some time. There are, however, great potential efficiencies in one platform collecting data, segmenting audiences and buying ads, she added.
“I think we’re going to need to see some dust settle and who’s still standing, and what the performance of some of those media platforms actually looks like,” she said.
Aside from the competitive tension of growing into new categories, including analytics and data clean room services, BlueConic and other CDPs also face major platform competitors.
“We’re seeing claims out of Snowflakes and the data warehouses of the world that they’re going to replace CDPs,” Munchbach said. But while those cloud players are essential partners for the same brand customers BlueConic works with, she said they aren’t designed for marketers and most often sit within IT rather than being an ingrained part of the marketing department.
As for the competitive set of Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle: “They would say they can do this too,” according to Munchbach, “but with solutions that are 15 or 20 years old, cobbled together and requiring a ton of services and consulting to even get stood up.”
CDPs are young, in other words, she said, and marketers are still figuring out exactly which services they want from their customer data vendors. It will be up to CDPs to prove what they can do.
