Data clean rooms let media companies connect their audience data with advertisers’ own information in a privacy-safe way. The latest clean room operator is Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, which owns ABC, ESPN, Hulu, eight TV stations, and more. They’re relying on technology from Habu, InfoSum, and Snowflake.
Customer engagement vendor CSG also has integration on its mind. They just launched Xponent, a unified customer engagement hub that supports marketing, sales, and service interactions with preconfigured campaigns, analytical models, and data libraries. Xponent combines CSG’s historical strength in delivery systems (they started out in telecom billing) with its recent acquisitions of the Kitewheel journey orchestration product and the Quaero CDP.
Global martech spending in 2021 is around $344.8 billion, according to this estimate from Martech Alliance. The figure isn’t a surprise but it’s still impressive. There’s lots more in the report, including a cameo appearance by CDP as the fourth-most commonly planned martech investment in the next 12 months (28% of respondents).
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.