Blockchain often seems over-hyped but one application that always made sense was streamlining the digital ad supply chain. Sure enough, a pilot run by IBM, Unilver, and others has yielded an average two to three percent savings. That’s a small fraction of what goes to intermediaries and fraudsters but presumably benefits will grow over time.
CDP Simon Data announced a $30 million Series C funding, bringing total funding to $59 million. Simon positions itself as “the first and only CDP with a fully-integrated marketing cloud” although it stops at orchestration, leaving message delivery to external systems.
Veritone One has an AI system that listens to podcasts to determine their content. They just announced that podcasting platform ART19 will use it to automatically match podcast ads with suitable content. Veritone also just added an option to pay podcasters based on purchases tied to promotion codes a podcaster has shared.
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.