Knowing who to trust is trickier than ever, and don’t get me started on fake news from blue checks at Twitter. The folks at LinkedIn are considerably more sensible. They’ve expanded their employment verification feature to job postings, ensuring that listings are made by someone who actually works at the company they claim.
It’s barely one year since Meta closed its $1 billion acquisition of the Kustomer CRM platform, which had been delayed since 2020 due to regulatory reviews. But Meta’s fortunes have changed since then and, like a family that bought a boat they couldn’t afford, they’ve now sold it back to the original owners for a fraction of what they paid. They did keep a minority stake.
Amazon’s palm-scanning technology offers highly reliable verification, although the price includes some hefty privacy concerns. They’ve just added age verification, so members can buy age-restricted items like alcohol without showing other ID. Retailers only see a message like “21+”, which is a good approach – so long as you trust Amazon not to do anything else with the information it’s collecting.
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.