The Boris Yelstin Presidential Center doesn’t come up very often in this newsletter, so I’m pleased to report that Mindbox, a Moscow-based integrated marketing systemn and CDP vendor that counts the Yelstin Center among its clients, has raised a $13 million investment to fuel its growth and international expansion. Boris would be proud.
Back on more familiar turf, how about a nice Adobe study that reports marketers are struggling to get value from technology? Yup, 65% say they feel their productivity is harmed by having too many technology options and 65% also say they can’t keep up with tech changes. Despite the problems, 79% say they regularly use data to make marketing decisions and 77% use it to demonstrate marketing’s value to the rest of the business. Download for more.
Build vs buy is not the focus of this Antavo report on customer loyalty systems, but what caught my eye was a 49% satisfaction rate for respondents using a home-built loyalty system compared with 63% for those using a purchased system. No-code fans will also appreciate that 44% say they’re currently very dependent on their IT team, 76% want to reduce that dependence, and 70% want no-code rule set-up. Plus lots here on loyalty program trends and impact.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.