We have a flight of advertising news today, Dear Reader. Start with a $33 million funding round for Ezoic, which uses AI to optimize Web site design and ad placements. Ezoic supports publishers of all sizes with pricing that starts as low as free (in exchange for an ad at the bottom the Web page).
Salesforce has signed a $1.35 billion deal to buy ClickSoftware, which helps schedule field service workers. Not very related to customer data but relevant if marketing is responsible for all customer experiences. Your head of field service might not agree.
The Customer Data Platform Industry continued its rapid growth in the first half of 2019, according to the CDP Institute's semi-annual Industry Update. The industry added nineteen vendors and raised $317 million in new capital during the period while employment was up 71% over the previous year.
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.