Where’s all the money coming from for these new tools? Gartner estimates that technology expanded its share of total marketing budgets to 29% in 2018, up from 22% in 2017. But don’t take this too seriously: the figure was 27% in the 2016 study. With a relatively small sample of “over 600” marketing leaders, the statistical significance of these shifts is doubtful. But the larger truth is clear: marketers spend a lot of money on tech.
Data and process integration vendor SnapLogic had two announcements yesterday: AI-powered workflows to automate IT integration projects and self-service machine learning. SnapLogic argues that “machine learning is an integration problem” because of all the data preparation and movement involved. It’s an odd perspective but it does illustrate automation of yet another process that once required highly skilled humans.
Lest you conclude that consumers are entirely irrational, a SurveyMonkey survey found they have a remarkably pragmatic view of why they’d lose trust in a company – placing poor product experience (81%) and poor customer service (78%) far ahead of a security breach (49%) or offensive advertising (46%). Similarly, 76% of U.S. consumers rated resolving problems as the most important element of customer service compared with just 37% who listed “feeling the customer service agent cares about you.”
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)