Next up: Point Pickup Technologies has purchased white label ecommerce platform GrocerKey. This highlights the trend of retailers taking control over last-mile delivery systems, rather than relying on United Parcel Service, Amazon, Uber, Instacart, or others. You’ll recall that WalMart opened its own delivery services to other retailers just last week.
Welcome to “Trends Nobody Else Cares About Day” at CDP Institute. We’ll start with Gap Inc.’s acquisition of virtual fitting room app Drapr, which lets consumers try on clothes remotely. This one’s a two-fer: it illustrates the trend for retailers to buy tech companies rather than just using their products, and the trend of virtual dressing rooms, following Walmart’s purchase of Zeekit in May. Woot!
Walmart doing stuff is apparently a trend in itself, but so far they seem to have missed the “data observability” market. We do have a $200 million Series C for data observability vendor Cribl. Just last week, Cribl competitor Monte Carlo raised a $60 million Series C of its own.
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.