CDP Institute

In slightly less bizarre broadcast news, media quality service Integral Ad Science has purchased connected TV ad platform Publica.  It sounds like a referee becoming a player, but IAS apparently sees it as improving the game for everyone.  Price was $220 million including 75% cash and 25% stock.

Contextual ad analytics expert GumGum has also jumped closer to the publisher side by buying JustPremium, one of the largest rich media and video ad marketplaces in Europe.  The deal will give GumGum more places to insert its contextually-targeted ad units.  Price wasn’t announced.

In case you still question whether marketing ops is Officially A Thing, this Brandmaker report finds 70% of senior marketers say their company has a dedicated marketing ops team and 73% say that team is responsible for both martech and tracking campaign performance.  The most-desired improvement was better integration of the tech stack, but, oddly, integration ranked fifth as an investment priority.  Download for lots more.

Shaped By’s survey of tech marketers also highlighted the role of tech: half the respondents said marketing is dominated by technology while about one-quarter said it was dominated by creativity.  (The rest said they’re about equal.)   Interestingly, small businesses put tech dominance much higher (61%) while enterprise marketers split evenly on tech vs creativity (37% each).  I’d guess that small businesses struggle more with tech because they have fewer resources, but maybe there’s something else going on.

Things look a bit different from the IT perspective. ServiceNow consultants Acorio found that companies are more focused on internal efficiency than customer satisfaction: for example, 76% track time to resolve an incident as a Key Performance Indicator while just 19% track customer satisfaction. Similarly, GenPact reports that CIOs are prioritizing projects such as artificial intelligence and cloud migrations, with customer experience tech ranked sixth on the list. One welcome bit of realism: just 22% of CIOs thought they were the primary drivers of digital transformation, while 61% recognized they... Read More >

Salesforce, which owns Mulesoft, took its own survey of 25,000 consumers, business leaders and IT managers worldwide.  They also found that business workers want direct access to data and IT capabilities (82%), in good part because just 37% are fully confident that their IT team has the skills and technology to keep up with demands.  There’s certainly a perception gap: 95% of IT leaders say they’re prioritizing workflow automation, while 58% of business users say IT is preoccupied with “keeping the lights on”.

This Kantar survey of 672 global ad executives confirms that they’re eager to use data more widely in their organizations (80%), to strengthen their data platforms (78%) and to improve data quality (64%).   More than half (56%) expect they’ll use first-party data to guide real time targeting in the future.

Mulesoft surveyed 1,700 business users to find that 68% are “citizen integrators” if that means they somehow help to deliver internal digital services. Nearly all (82%) agree employees need easy access to IT systems and data, 59% agree that failure to connect systems hinders growth, and 44% said their IT department is a roadblock to innovation. A second Mulesoft survey, covering 2,400 IT and business leaders, found 83% feel their groups have become more aligned in the past year (83%) and 87% feel that security and governance concerns are slowing... Read More >

It’s martech funding all the way down today, Dear Reader.  First we have a $125 million Series E for Bluecore, which gathers ecommerce customer data, predicts the next best offer, and sends it via email, site messages or advertising.  The round more than doubles their total funding to $238 million.

Here’s a $103 million Series D for Fullstory, which captures and analyzes digital experiences to identify opportunities for improvement.  The  company says its recurring revenue is up 70% year on year and it now has more than 3,100 clients.  The round brings their total funding to $172 million.

Retain.ai also has raised funds for experience analytics, although it’s a slightly different flavor: they capture browser data from customer service staff to understand how support teams are spending their time, and use the results to analyze support costs and recommend improvements. The $23 million Series A brings their total funding to $27.6 million.

Social media management platform Hootsuite has purchased Heyday, a system that embeds human and AI-based chat in ecommerce, CRM, and other customer-facing systems.  Price was $48 million.  Heyday launched in July 2020 and had raised $6.7 million Don’t confuse them with Heyday.co the marketplace acceleration platform, which has raised $245 million.