It’s a quiet news day, Dear Reader. The most excitement I can offer is a $165 million Series H from integration platform SnapLogic, which brings total funding to $371 million and values them at $1 billion. That’s nice but you already knew that integration is a booming industry.
If connected golf carts aren’t weird enough for you, let’s just discard reality altogether and generate videos with synthetic people. That’s what Synthesia has been doing for several years, and now offer at the crazy-low cost of $30 per month for up to ten minutes. You can try it for free here or see my own attempt here. They just raised 50 million presumably real dollars.
We do have some nice data news left over from last week, when LiveRamp announced it has connected its identity graph with Lotame. The deal will let Lotame customers access LiveRamp’s person ID, expanding their options for cross-channel audience selection and measurement.
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.