After more suspense than was strictly necessary, Apple has finally set “next week” as the start date for its new rules requiring that consumers consent to tracking by App Store apps. We’ll see if this truly destroys the Internet as we know it. By coincidence or not, Apple was the target of less positive attention today in Senate anti-trust hearings.
You haven’t been terribly interested in funding announcements recently, Dear Reader. But surely you’re intrigued that marketing automation vendor ActiveCampaign just raised $240 million at a valuation of more than $3 billion. That’s close to 20x its $165 million annual recurring revenue, which is nearly double the $90 million it had one year before. Apparently marketing automation isn’t quite a commodity after all.
Microsoft, which really should know better, has announced its own bird-themed ad targeting solution. Inexcusably-named “Parakeet” assigns people to cohorts similar to Google FLoC, but runs ad auctions in a proxy server rather than the user’s browser. Parakeet was first proposed in February but gained attention this week when Microsoft referred to it in a statement dodging the question of whether it would enable FLoC in its Edge browser.
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.