Ternio says it has a blockchain that runs more than one million transactions per second. They have an independent audit to prove it but no commercial product. That will start to change in July when they begin trials of a blockchain-based programmatic ad exchange.
I have no pressing news for you today, although Vista Equity Partners buying a majority interest in ad safety firm Integral Ad Science is sort of interesting, as is Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of Github.
Peering into the future, users choices about which sites to visit will be replaced by AI systems that decide for us. AI vendor Neura offers a glimpse of that world by tracking location with mobile and Internet of Things devices and letting marketers subscribe to “moments” such as “arrived at office”. Anonymized, of course. They’ve just added “True Personas” which uses location history to assign people to categories like “avid runner”, “hard worker” or “late sleeper”. Sign me up! Or maybe they already did.
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.