Adobe has announced several enhancements to its Real-time CDP, including: Segment Match, a second-party data sharing feature; Look-Alike Segments, which identifies customers similar to a sample group; and B2B enhancements including a combination of individual and account profiles. Nothing revolutionary here but their product is continuing to mature.
Omni-channel messaging platform MessageBird announced a $600 million acquisition of email optimization platform SparkPost, $1 billion Series C extension (from the previous $200 million), and entry to the U.S. market. We also just learned that MessageBird bought the Hull.io CDP at the end of March, along with video platform 24sessions. The deals strengthen MessageBird’s competitive position against Twilio, which you will recall bought the Segment CDP last year.
If you’re looking for something a bit more radical, how about interactive voice advertising? Instreamatic has raised $6.1 million so you can yell at an ad and it will not just answer back, but remember what you said in the future. Somehow this counts as progress.
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.