Just two days after the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced a record $240 million GDPR fine for British Airways, the ICO announced a $123 million penalty against Marriott. Like the British Airways fine, this was for a data breach. But it does suggest that marketers should pay serious attention to the ICO’s savage criticism of real time ad bidding.
Money money money. I avoided funding announcements on Wednesday but I can’t resist sharing that privacy management vendor OneTrust has raised a $200 million Series A. Yes, privacy is big business and getting bigger.
Oddly enough, we have a second announcement today about automated video creation. This is from GliaStudio, which enables “customers to generate quality videos simply from their news content, social posts, live sports events, and even statistical data in minutes.” They’ve just made this available on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.
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.