Last Friday’s newsletter cited an Adweek article about global consultancies buying ad agencies. Here’s the other side of that coin: an Adweek piece on ad agencies building out their consultancy practices. The grand point being, that technology and marketing are becoming indistinguishably intertwined. You probably knew that.
Adobe made a slew of announcements at its Summit 2017 conference, including a “Experience Cloud” as a master label for its Marketing, Advertising, and Analytics Clouds. Not much talk of direct integration among those components, though. Adobe did discuss connecting them to its Sensei artificial intelligence platform and Creative Cloud. There was one bit of data-related news: Adobe is working with several other vendors to create a standard marketing data model. This would simplify future integrations.
As advertising involves more technology (see above), it’s no wonder that tech experts are playing a larger role in the industry. Here’s a very interesting piece from Ad Week on investments in ad agencies by giant tech firms like Accenture and IBM. Did you know that Accenture already has 36,000 design and creative professionals worldwide? If you’re wondering what this means for marketing technology and CDPs, here are some additional thoughts.
Customer engagement platform Twilio has integrated with OpenAI’s Realtime API to enable Twilio customers and developers to build AI-powered conversational apps. The integration will support the creation of speech-to-speech voice conversations featuring AI agents. This is an expansion of existing Twilio/OpenAI integrations.