OnePulse is a social media community app that takes surveys for marketers. That puts them in the same neighborhood as Lithium and Market Logic. But they must have a smaller apartment, since they just announced a modest $2 million in new funding (bringing their total to $3 million) ahead of their U.S. launch.
Marketing automation is so 2012. Today’s hot category is customer experience orchestration. The latest entry is Sydney-based PASCAL51, which has just announced $250,000 in seed capital and plans for a beta program. What’s impressive is that so little capital can fund a system that “ingests data, learns from it, generates an insight and subsequent recommendation and then automates the next best action”. One enabler is using open source technologies including Kafka, Spark and Hadoop.
Stepping back still further: strategy consultants Bain & Company have concluded that business management itself is undergoing a radical transition.
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.