Over on the ecommerce side, we have a strategic global partnership between ecommerce platform Elastic Path and BloomReach, which offers semantic AI-based recommendations and Web content management. The alliance is positioned as helping marketers who want to use best-of-breed products, so you can think of it as an alternative to consolidation. No details on what, if anything, the vendors will do to make their systems work together.
Openbridge provides a data integration software and services with prebuilt connectors for over 600 systems, including many marketing automation, personalization, and analytics tools. They’ve built some connectors themselves and have now launched a “data marketplace” including connectors from other vendors, including the Segment CDP as well as Fivetran, Funnel, Stitch, and Alooma. Openbridge also provide professional services to help with challenges such as customer identity matching. It’s an interesting approach.
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.
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.