The need for speed extends to consumers: a study from content creator marketplace IZEA found that interest in “snackable” visual content is growing faster than any other category. Irony alert: the study on snackable content is 89 pages long. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, although I didn’t have time to get through it all. Download the actual study here.
B2B martech vendor Demandbase has raised $65 million in new financing, bringing its total to over $150 million. Demandbase has focused its business Account Based Marketing data and services, a strategy that resulted in quadrupled revenue over the past three years.
DataSift also assembles data about people, in its case taking feeds from social media sites. Some is anonymized and some is linked to individuals, depending on what the site owner allows. DataSift just set up a feed of anonymized LinkedIn data to crystal.io, an artificial intelligence-powered “virtual advisor” promises insightful answers to marketers’ questions. To be clear (get it?), crystal.io works only with aggregated data, so it can’t tell you what Dad wants for Father’s Day.
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.