CDP Institute

Squiz, a “global digital transformation organization”, asked 600+ senior marketers at large enterprises about marketing technology.

Cornell.edu defines hyperbolic geometry as “the geometry you get by assuming all the postulates of Euclid, except the fifth one, which is replaced by its negation.“

Criteo also uses advanced math to optimize marketing programs, in its case doing cross-device matching, buying display, social and mobile app ads, and tailoring the ads to each viewer and context. The company just released a research study on cross-device commerce.  It documents the continued growth of purchases on mobile devices and finds that one-third of online transactions may be misattributed without cross-device tracking.  Interesting data.

Speaking of interesting data, we have a study from brand marketing agency Havas Worldwide, which surveyed 11,976 people in 37 markets.

B2C marketing automation is an established category but new entrants can still find a place if they offer something different.  Cordial eliminates conventional email and mobile campaigns by automatically picking the best time to contact each customer and running self-optimizing content tests to pick the best content.  It builds a unified customer database and reacts to new events in real time. The company just raised $6 million, bringing their total funding to $8 million.

MomentFeed targets another niche: national brands with local outlets, such as restaurant and retail chains.  The company’s system automatically customizes online marketing materials with localized information such as the street address and business hours of the nearest store.  It supports mobile search, social media, mobile advertising, and reviews. MomentFeed just raised $16.3 million in a Series C, bringing total funding to $24.5 million.

ReachLocal provides small businesses with an all-in-one marketing system including marketing automation; search, display, and social advertising; Web site creation and search engine optimization; plus chat, social sites, and directory listings. The company was purchased by USA TODAY parent Gannet in June 2016 for $156 million. USA TODAY just announced a phased rollout of ReachLocal to its 109 local markets.

Struggling to make sense of it all?

Revcontent is a “content discovery network”, which means they put those little “from the around the Web” story advertisements on the Web sites you browse. They do it 250 billion times per month. (It feels like I personally account for at least 500 million of that total, but probably not.) They’ve just acquired Rover, a machine learning recommendation company that should help them do a better job of matching recommendations to viewers.

Innit lives at the crazy intersection of mobile apps, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, location-based services, loyalty management, and heaven knows what else.

Singtel’s Amobee division announced today it is acquiring Turn for $310 million.

Here’s a simpler story: DigSite will deliver consumer reactions to proposed products, ad concepts, graphic designs, and such in 24 hours. The company assembles online consumer groups, presents materials, gathers reactions, and analyzes the results. DigSite carefully avoids the term “focus group” but that’s what it sounds like to me. They previously turned around their projects in one week but have now streamlined their process.