Good morning, and hello 2020!
The holidays may be over, but we’re still easing back into the office here at MarTech Today. Before we jump full force into the new year, we’re taking a look at the biggest martech acquisitions and integrations that shaped our industry last year. From Salesforce’s deal to buy Tableau for $15.7 billion to Automattic Inc.’s purchase of Tumblr, last year’s martech deals proved Scott Brinker was on the money when he predicted 2019 would be a buyer’s market for marketing technology mergers and acquisitions.
We also saw an impressive number of martech integrations, especially across chat, email and data solutions. Shopify added new messaging capabilities via Apple Business Chat and new ad integrations with Facebook, Google, SnapChat and Microsoft. Adobe deepened its partnership with Microsoft, as did Salesforce, and Lytics added Salesforce and Google Marketing Platform integrations to its CDP.
Nexthink is among the first to submit an entry for the 2020 Stackie Awards. Jon Blumenfeld, Nexthink’s director of digital marketing, has put together an interactive “Periodic Table of Martech,” highlighting the 120 martech tools Blumenfeld ranks as the most relevant to enterprise B2B SaaS. The 2020 Stackie Awards are open for entries until March 20 — so let this be the inspiration that gets your creative ideas flowing!
2019 proved to be the year U.S. marketers got real about privacy issues. “There was a convergence of legal, technological and cultural factors that forced brands, publishers and tech companies to confront privacy head-on in ways they’d been trying to avoid for years,” writes MarTech Today’s Greg Sterling. With the EU’s GDPR well underway after its launch in May 2018, last year saw marketers preparing for similar regulations with today’s CCPA launch.
Sterling believes our industry has witnessed a major transition culturally — and legally — with privacy now serving as a central feature of the user experience going forward: “Privacy-conscious consumers will reward companies that are more transparent and shun those that are opaque or manipulative.”
We’re not done yet: Don’t miss the big list of Pro Tips we’ve curated from our martech community during the last 12 months, Vox Media’s newest first-party ad targeting solution and the headlines we’ve been reading over the holiday stretch — it’s all below for your reading pleasure.
Amy Gesenhues,
Senior Editor
