Adventure! Drama! Comedy! You won’t find any of those in the news that Walmart has expanded its third-party Web marketplace to include Shopify merchants. But it’s still a reminder of Walmart’s continued development as an Amazon alternative.
Ah, some straight up news for a change: Account Based Marketing vendor Demandbase has bought Account Based Marketing vendor Engagio. There’s some overlap but enough difference for the deal to make sense.
Other industries haven’t been as severely disrupted as retail, so it makes sense that under two-thirds of senior business and IT executives from a broad range of industries told Telstra that COVID-19 had changed their organizations forever. Interesting regional disparities: 63% of European companies said they expect to close branches or reduce headquarters offices compared with just 40% of U.S. and North Asian respondents. And U.S. companies were more likely to than others to prioritize cost over revenue as their main digital transformation goal.
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.