Inching a bit closer to reality, Lowes launched an augmented video chat service that lets workers remotely evaluate and sometimes complete repair and maintenance projects. It’s all browser based, so easily accessible to repair people and customers with little technology investment. Like other remote-working solutions, it will probably remain popular even after the pandemic has ended.
There have been several studies in recent days reporting that ad spend is recovering from the pandemic-driven lows of March. This particular one from Pixalate reports a 40% increase in April/May for programmatic ads for Over-the-Top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV), compared with a 14% drop in March. Kids and Family apps on Roku grew by 128%.
Back in the USA, analytical database vendor Snowflake, which powers a number of CDPs, announced a Data Cloud “ecosystem” of data providers and consumers. The cloud includes a data marketplace for third party data and a data exchange for second party data, both in public preview. They also announced private preview of features including data masking and tokenization for privacy.
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.