Facebook is purchasing .gif platform Giphy for a reported $400 million. Half of Giphy’s traffic comes from non-Facebook properties, so the deal will expand Facebook’s ability to observe and profit from behavior elsewhere. The deal won’t put a dent in Facebook’s $60 billion cash hoard.
About five percent of all Tweets come from bots, with a rate as high as 20% for trending hashtags like #COVID-19, according to a study from NortonLifeLock. Perhaps more interesting, they just released a free test version of a browser extension that can classify individual Tweets in your personal Twitter feed.
CDPs are increasingly used by corporate IT departments, so it’s worth understanding how IT staff thinks. Integration platform vendor Cleo found that IT sees the biggest benefits from improved integration as reduced cost (66%) and meeting service level agreements (57%). Happier customers come in third at 53%. IT finds legacy applications to be the biggest integration challenge, a position marketers are more likely to share.
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.