Finally, let’s pay some rare attention to small business marketers. Roku has launched an app that lets merchants buy streaming TV ads through Shopify.  UZE has created a self-service platform that lets small advertisers place ads on vehicle-mounted digital displays across Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. And all-in-one digital marketing platform Sendinblue has become aller-in-one and indulged its fetish for odd company names by purchasing Chatra (messaging), Metrilo (ecommerce analytics), and PushOwl (web push).

Adobe is also pressing for increased automation, and just proudly announced that over 80% of Experience Cloud customers are using at least one AI-powered feature.  Huzzah.  The latest additions to their AI menagerie are automated marketing mix modeling and marketing spend optimization based on estimates of the incremental impact of specific marketing touchpoints.

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.