Unlike CDP vendors, big consultancies buy little consultancies all the time. So it isn’t big news that Accenture has purchased Media Hive, which provides e-commerce solutions and specializes in supporting the Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware). But it’s still interesting to see firms like Accenture expanding their presence in the marketing technology world.
Here’s a fun item: Toronto-based Cluep analyzes images that people post on social media, extracts information such as brands, products, and activities, and uses it to target real-time advertising. It also identifies the age, gender, and ethnicity of people in the pictures; analyzes sentiments expressed towards topics, brands, and keywords; and incorporates weather and location-based targeting. On second thought, is that fun or is it creepy?
Social media analytics firm DataSift announced a new Media Strategies API that will use insights from social data to help ad agencies define target audiences and content topics. The new product is an extension of DataSift’s core business of analyzing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social streams. Shockingly, DataSift doesn’t call itself an artificial intelligence firm, although it does mention natural language processing, machine learning, and Big Data.
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.