Privacy is another spot of troubled water where adtech vendors are fishing. AppNexus has announced an initiative to ensure compliance with privacy rules imposed by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Not breaking the law isn’t usually a differentiator, but so many companies are lagging in GDPR preparation that it could well turn out to give AppNexus an advantage.
SimpleReach has built a niche business in assembling information about marketing content consumption, calling itself a “content data platform” although it doesn’t use the initials CDP. Data gathered by the system is used to by publishers and marketers to create a unified view of content distribution. The company just announced $13 million in funding, bringing its total to $24 million.
For a broader picture of consumer behavior, we have a study from market research firm PQ Media, which found total media usage has reached seven hours per day worldwide and ten hours per day in the U.S. Mobile media are growing fastest while desktop usage is declining.
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.