Although physical stores and company websites remain the most popular business channels for retailers, social commerce (used by 50%) is now only two points behind mobile web/apps in popularity. As for retail media networks, 51% of retailers added one to their digital service offerings in 2023. Marketplaces are also growing in popularity thanks to their extension of customer reach.
Customer communication platform Iterable is launching the Iterable Ingest Toolkit as part of its winter product release. It features Smart Ingest that connects with major cloud platforms and allows marketers to pull customer data into Iterable. Iterable is also bringing AI-driven customer insights to its users’ Snowflake data through its Snowflake Secure Data integration.
The growth of programmatic ad spend will be double that of nonprogrammatic in 2024 according to a forecast by eMarketer Insider Intelligence. Around 90% of ad dollars will transact programmatically despite concerns about transparency and control. Mobile will continue to be the programmatic channel of choice; it has commanded at least a 70% market share since 2018.
Tofu has raised $12 million in Series A funding to support the ongoing development of its AI-powered unified marketing platform. Identifying worsening “martech bloat” as a problem for GTM teams, Tofu is proffering its platform as an integrated marketing solution with gen AI embedded. This intended to avoid the adoption of multiple AI-related tools with overlapping functionality.