It seems that automated creative management is pretty darn popular. Thunder creates, targets, and optimizes personalized display and social ads. They recently bought Adacus, which does AI-based multi-touch attribution, cross-device identity matching, natural language processing for contextual personalization, product recommendations, and creative asset recommendations based on past performance.
HubSpot announced its purchase of easy-to-use chatbot builder Motion AI, the firm’s third AI acquisition this year after Kemvi (intelligence extraction) and Evolve App (dating advice…yes, really). The inbound marketing company also announced that marketing technology uber-guru Scott Brinker will be joining as Vice President of Platform Ecosystem, where he will encourage partners to build products for the HubSpot platform. Related: Brinker’s old firm, ion interactive, was just purchased by ScribbleLive.
Immuta isn’t a CDP: it builds unified, accessible databases for been intelligence analysts, not marketers. The company just released a product targeted at data scientists in general. Its sophisticated controls over data access and privacy protection are an interesting benchmark for marketers and CDP systems.
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.