In a far different corner of the galaxy, Instacart announced a $265 million financing round for its pandemic-fueled online grocery business. The raise brings total funding to $2.7 billion and values the company at $39 billion. This has more to do with martech than you may think: some of the money will grow Instacart marketplace and advertising services that leverage its massive customer base.
CDP BlueVenn has been purchased by Upland Software, which owns a cluster of customer engagement products including Adestra, Kapost, PostUp, and Localytics. The company expects BlueVenn to unify and share data across all its systems. Price was $52 million, a modest 3.5x BlueVenn’s reported revenue of $15 million. It’s the latest of several CDP acquisitions by firms planning to connect separate customer engagement products.
Disney is also expanding its data-driven ad business, launching a programmatic exchange for video ads, leveraging its data for cross-channel targeting, and selling combined inventory across Hulu and Disney properties. They’re even promoting their own Disney Audience Graph as a partial replacement for third-party cookies. Isn’t everyone?
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.