More BadTech: Bloomberg (again) has uncovered a “secret” deal for Mastercard to sell retail transaction data to Google so they can connect online ads to in-store purchases. Somehow the fact that it wasn’t announced is treated as extraordinarily sinister. The data seems to be properly anonymized so it’s not clear why this is any more problematic than scads of other online-to-offline tracking projects.
Social customer care vendor Lithium has merged with social marketing platform Spredfast. The products will be merged into a single platform, according to their announcement. Lithium is owned by Vista Equity Partners, which also owns Marketo and Cvent. Spredfast had accrued $138 million in funding per Crunchbase and 582 employees on LinkedIn; the same sources show $202 million funding and 634 employees for Lithium.
CMOs are also looking to a future where they get more data directly from their customers, according to the Duke Fuqua CMO Survey. Seventy percent expected to use more online customer data in the next two years compared with just 30% expecting to use more third party data. If you’re never seen this report, take a peek: it’s a 73-page trove of data on many topics. And if you want more on the future of third party data, check out this recent post on Customer Experience Matrix.
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.