And then there were none: experience analytics vendor Medallia is buying Thunderhead, the last major independent journey orchestration platform. Previous acquisitions in the field have included: Pointillist bought by Genesys in October 2021; Kitewheel acquired by CSG in July 2021; and Usermind acquired by Qualtrics, also in July 2021.
Still dark and closer to home for marketers, IBM looked at AI bias in programmatic advertising. Working with industry groups, they’ve released an open source toolkit AI Fairness 360 that can detect it. They concluded potentially harmful bias does exist but were optimistic that technical cures could be found, although ad efficiency might suffer.
The trend for supersized martech funding rounds continued today with a $200 million Series E for 6sense, the once-struggling, now-surging account based marketing platform. Total 6sense funding now stands at $426 million. 6sense probably has a CDP buried somewhere inside of it, having acquired ZenIQ back in 2018.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.