Bot-based sales and marketing platform Drift announced a much smaller acquisition, of sales email response system Siftrock (no funding listed on Crunchbase, 4 employees on LinkedIn). They were more excited about a new “conversational advertising” product that seems to be an ad which points to a bot instead of a landing page. Um, okay. They also announced partnerships with Marketo, Demandbase, and Outreach.
Salesforce has announced plans to add AI-based behavior scoring and AI-based insights into content and subject line engagement to its Pardot marketing automation system, which exists within its Sales cloud. Release is targeted for next February. Not too exciting but illustrates the steady expansion of AI in marketing products.
Again: Tuesday’s New York Times carried two stories that Facebook is used by bad people, in Libya and the U.S. What’s new isn’t the information but the implication that Facebook should change or be regulated. That’s BadTech.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.