Private equity investors continue to replace public markets as the main buyers of marketing and advertising tech companies. Latest transaction is DoubleVerify, which battles online ad fraud by authenticating that impressions are viewed and the viewers are human. Buyer was Providence Equity Partners. They didn’t announce a price but the Wall Street Journey says they paid around $200 million for a majority stake.
Gravity4 calls itself “the world’s first A.I. big data marketing cloud”, which sounds suspiciously fluffy but is backed by some substance. They focus mostly on programmatic advertising but have “apps” that support other channels. Latest news is they’ve released a blockchain-based service for paid digital advertising. Bonus trivia: the product is called “Lydian” in honor of Lydia, the first civilization to use coins (not Lydia, the tattooed lady).
If anything is more credible than academic acceptance, it’s funding. So that AI-driven analytics vendor ThoughtSpot has raised more than $160 million speaks for itself. ThoughtSpot just announced SpotIQ, which automatically queries enterprise data sources and returns “deep and relevant insights for users that they may not have thought to look for on their own”. The company says that “SpotIQ accomplishes in a single click what could take 40,000 man hours.” It doesn’t say which men, doing what, or how long it would take a team of women.
CDP and marketing automation platform Bloomreach announced the availability of a next generation version of Bloomreach Engagement. Deploying Bloomreach’s Loomi AI capabilities, campaign creation within Bloomreach Engagement will become something “one marketer can complete in minutes.” Campaigns can be scaled across fifteen-plus channels.