In case you still question whether marketing ops is Officially A Thing, this Brandmaker report finds 70% of senior marketers say their company has a dedicated marketing ops team and 73% say that team is responsible for both martech and tracking campaign performance. The most-desired improvement was better integration of the tech stack, but, oddly, integration ranked fifth as an investment priority. Download for lots more.
Contextual ad analytics expert GumGum has also jumped closer to the publisher side by buying JustPremium, one of the largest rich media and video ad marketplaces in Europe. The deal will give GumGum more places to insert its contextually-targeted ad units. Price wasn’t announced.
Shaped By’s survey of tech marketers also highlighted the role of tech: half the respondents said marketing is dominated by technology while about one-quarter said it was dominated by creativity. (The rest said they’re about equal.) Interestingly, small businesses put tech dominance much higher (61%) while enterprise marketers split evenly on tech vs creativity (37% each). I’d guess that small businesses struggle more with tech because they have fewer resources, but maybe there’s something else going on.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.