The Google/Facebook duopoly’s share of digital ad revenue may have peaked, according to eMarketer figures. They predict the two companies will capture 56.8% of the market in 2018, down from 58.5% in 2017. But don’t think of this as a victory for the little guy: Amazon and Snapchat are taking up the slack.
Salesforce is spending $6.5 billion to purchase Mulesoft, which builds connectors to transfer data between systems. Salesforce positioned the deal as a way to “enable all enterprises to surface any data—regardless of where it resides—to drive deep and intelligent customer experiences throughout a personalized 1:1 journey.” Data connectors like MuleSoft differ from CDPs because they don’t build a persistent database of their own. See this blog post for a more nuanced reaction from CDP Institute CEO David Raab.
The Customer Data Platform Institute is launching its European operation next week with presentations in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg.
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.