Sentient Technology Holdings has spun off Sentient Ascend, an AI-based Web experience optimization system, which will now be Evolv Technology Solutions. Evolv has also raised $10 million. There are several Evolv’s in the industry but this one, based in San Francisco, is essentially the former Ascend team.
ClickDimensions, which offers a marketing automation add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365, has just purchased marketing dashboard vendor Sweetspot. There’s a certain CDP-ish ring to the deal, since SweetSpot assembles data from multiple sources (including “almost 50 prebuilt connectors”) and makes it available for analysis. But, no, this doesn’t make ClickDimensions a CDP.
Fraud prevention firm Pixalate took a closer look at digital ad fraud and found 21% of online ads were fraudulent in the fourth quarter of 2018. This was 17% higher the previous quarter, which Pixalate attributed to higher ad volumes make it easier for fraud to slip by undetected. One piece of good news: Websites using ads.txt to verify placements had 23% less invalid traffic than sites that did not.
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.