Another sign of peak martech? Investment firm LUMA found the number of martech deals rose just slightly (42 to 45) in Q3 of this year, while the value of publicly traded martech firms actually fell. Deal volume in digital content and Direct-to-Consumer rose much more. The report mentions last month’s purchase by Zeta Global of CDP vendor IgnitionOne’s legacy DSP business, which slipped under this newsletters’ radar.
Lots of small-but-significant news today, Dear Reader. Oracle has purchased cloud-based loyalty platform CrowdTwist. Industry trends illustrated: marketers focus on full life cycle, not just acquisition; cross-channel orchestration; shift to cloud; expanded scope for enterprise marketing vendors; prebuilt campaigns to speed deployment.
Speaking of customer experience, consultancy COPC found consumer satisfaction with multichannel experience reached the lowest point in the eight years they’ve been keeping score, falling to 38% from 57% in 2018. There’s plenty more in this 75 page report so let’s just pull one factoid: only 60% of respondents said they’d used the phone to resolve a service issue in the past year.
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.