MNTN helps direct response advertisers sell on streaming TV networks. They’re on a roll, having just bought Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency Maximum Effort and video creation platform QuickFrame. That all costs money, so their latest acquisition is a pile of 119 million U.S. dollars. The round triples their total funding from a prior total of $64.8 million.
Trackers gonna track: SXM Media, the ad sales arm of SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher, has launched a cooklieless personal identifier to track its listeners. The system collects “a variety of consented listener signals and inputs” to determine which devices belong to the same individual, and uses the resulting “AudioID” for ad targeting and measurement. Initial deployments will be limited to SXM Media’s own properties but the company plans to add audiences on other platforms later this year.
There’s not much novelty left in artificial intelligence or no-code tech, and even the combination is a bit of a yawn. Still CausaLens gets a second look because their $45 million Series A will go to AI using “cause and effect” logic instead of basic correlations and pattern recognition. In case you do want more AI information, here’s a Persado study that finds 54% of companies are already using it to create personalized experiences and all but 7% plan to join them.
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.