The email industry continues to consolidate. Mailgun, which sold a majority stake to private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April, is buying Mailjet. Each firm brings more than 100,000 customers to the deal, but Mailgun is more of an API-driven engine for developers while Mailjet offers a complete user interface.
As more advertisers buy media for themselves, media companies are rushing to provide tools to help. Streaming video company Roku just bought dataxu, a Demand Side Platform used to manage digital ad campaigns. Price was $150 million.
Like other martech outsiders, the big ad holding companies have bought customer data expertise: see Merkle/Dentsu, Acxiom/IPG, and Epsilon/Publicis. WPP’s Wunderman Thompson has plenty of customer data experience – the late Lester Wunderman coined the term “direct marketing” in 1967 – but they still aren’t building their own systems. Instead, they’ve just announced a deal to use Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP within their Customer Cloud platform.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.