Post-cookie measurement is on the minds of Topsort, a retail media adtech startup that just raised a $20 million Series A. The company offers a retail media tech stack, data clean room, and retailer ad network. They’re especially proud of their AI-driven ad bidding engine.
Measuring ad performance was never easy, but privacy-related data restrictions and fragmented media channels have made it much harder than ever. Google is offering Meridian, an open-source media mix modeling system that won’t be as precise as cookie-based measurement but does promise to draw a meaningful big picture. It’s in limited release now with plans to offer it to everyone “coming soon”.
Location data raises plenty of privacy issues but Placer.ai sidesteps them by selling aggregated traffic information. They have just expanded their partnership with retail analytics giant dunnhumby, which will use the information to build a unified picture of in-store and out-of-store customer journeys.
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.