There’s probably a Yiddish proverb about every cloud having a silver lining, but I don’t know it. In the meantime, ad buying platform Amobee is treating brand safety and fraud prevention as promotable features. Amobee scans programmatic inventory from more than fifteen exchanges, filtering suspicious bids, fraudulent mobile apps, and objectionable content. Buyers get refunds if verified errors slip through.
Back to the news. Social media management vendor Sprout Social announced they’re acquiring social analytics vendor Simply Measured. Unlike most of the martech space, social media technology is seeing a fair amount of vendor consolidation.
We’re all about money today. Open source artificial intelligence vendor H2O.ai announced a $40 million Series C, making total investment $73.6 million. The firm provides machine learning tools for data scientists and non-technical users. It says more than 12,000 companies and 129,000 individuals have downloaded its software.
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.