Like much of the tech industry, the News Gods seem to be phoning it in this week. They did offer a modestly interesting acquisition: CRM vendor Pipedrive purchased email marketing automation system Mailigen. Interesting because the idea seems to be for salespeople to run their own automated email campaigns. Maybe that makes them “citizen marketers”.
Just after we finished scratching our head over Salesforce’s acquisition of The CMO Club, email giant Mailchimp announced it had bought Courier Media, a London-based publisher whose main product is a 100,000-circulation print magazine for small-business people (not small business-people). So, martech vendors owning media organizations is apparently now a Thing. Let’s interpret it as vendors ensuring they can reach their audiences without relying third party data.
Not quite a bot but close: digital agency Jellyfish has leveraged the Google Cloud Vision API to analyze performance of video and dynamic ad content and recommend the best-performing items for new ads. You could have people do that but it would be a lot of work and nowhere near as impressive.
Google has given up on its FLoC cookie-less targeting initiative, which faced insurmountable privacy objections. The replacement, which mercifully does not reference anything bird-related, is Topics API, which will offer three recent interests for each individual based on sites they have recently visited. The loss in targeting and tracking power is so huge that you wonder if Google is purposely showing what tighter privacy is costing the industry. Or maybe they’re just kneecapping competitors.