The trend for supersized martech funding rounds continued today with a $200 million Series E for 6sense, the once-struggling, now-surging account based marketing platform. Total 6sense funding now stands at $426 million. 6sense probably has a CDP buried somewhere inside of it, having acquired ZenIQ back in 2018.
And then there were none: experience analytics vendor Medallia is buying Thunderhead, the last major independent journey orchestration platform. Previous acquisitions in the field have included: Pointillist bought by Genesys in October 2021; Kitewheel acquired by CSG in July 2021; and Usermind acquired by Qualtrics, also in July 2021.
If you want to put marketing and advertising in a broader context, take a look at Winterberry Group’s 13th annual Advertising, Marketing, and Data industry outlook report. They’re bullish on industry growth in general, reporting a 21.5% increase in 2021, after a 4.8% decline in 2019, and projecting another 11.8% growth in 2022. Fun fact: Winterberry says more is spent on influencer marketing and on audio marketing than on email.
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.