For broader trends in tech deals, Hampleton Partners’ reports that 61% of digital marketing M&A spending last year was on services compared with just 39% on software. Biggest acquirers were agencies like Dentsu and Accenture. Also, private equity groups doubled their investment last year and were up 4x since 2015. Interesting.
Just two weeks ago, we reported that “conversational marketing platform” Drift had added a module for sales reps and mentioned in passing that they had raised $47 million to date.
CDP mParticle has joined mobile martech vendors AppsFlyer, Braze, and Amplitude to create a OpenGDPR, a public API specification for responding to subject data requests. In plainer English, the companies have built a way for different systems to cooperate at finding data about an individual, which is needed to comply with the new European Union GDPR privacy regulation. They hope others will adopt their framework as a standard. The goal is to make compliance easier – without a shared framework, it could be nightmarishly difficult.
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.