Xtremepush started as a messaging system but is now one of the companies hoping to sell you a unified digital engagement platform. Yes, it includes a CDP. They just raised $33 million to double their workforce and accelerate their global expansion.
The build vs buy debate isn’t over. More than half of companies are either entirely (16%) or partly (38.5%) building their own “customer/marketing data platform”, according to this survey of UK and EU CMOs by Martech Alliance for Treasure Data. Fewer were stitching together best-of-breed vendor solutions (32.5%) and just 10.5% were relying on a single vendor’s integrated marketing suite. Perhaps related: just 20% have fully connected customer profiles and 48% say their company fails to meet customer expectations for a unified experience.
Publicis Groupe has purchased CitrusAd, a platform that places ads on ecommerce websites, in physical stores, and in email. It will be a standalone business within Publicis’ Epsilon group. If this sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Dentsu bought ecommerce agency LiveArea for its Merkle unit just two weeks ago.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.