Weekly martech review: Uberall acquires competitor, Amazon unifies ad products, Branch raising >$100m
We review the top news in martech from the week of September 4–10, 2018.
In our review of last week’s martech news, we highlight Uberall’s acquisition of competitor Navads, Amazon’s unification of ad platforms, and Branch raising >$100m.
Location-marketing platform Uberall acquires competitor Navads and raises another $25m, now second-largest after Yext.
What it is
Uberall is a German startup that provides a location marketing cloud to localize all aspects of online marketing and increase local sales. Navads, a competitor, is also described as an industry leader in listings and location data management, specializing in mobile navigation, autonomous vehicles, and voice search.
Why it matters
With this acquisition, Uberall claims it will be the second-largest location marketing platform in the world, after US-based rival Yext. They’ll have more than 1500 global customers covering 700,000 locations. Uberall has raised over $50m in Series B funding in 2018.
Amazon to unify all ad products in new Amazon Advertising brand.
What it is
Amazon announced that it will bring Amazon Media Group (AMG), Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) all under one brand: Amazon Advertising. The old brand names will be retired in the next several months.
Why it matters
These three brands covered managed display and video services, seller ads, and programmatic solutions. The evolution from disparate to unified reflects Amazon’s evolution of services and product offerings, along with broader industry trends toward integration and omnichannel.
Deep-linking startup Branch is raising more than $100m at unicorn valuation.
What it is
Branch, a four-year-old company, enables companies to create deep links between websites and mobile apps. Deep links take you to a specific piece of web content, rather than to a website’s homepage. For instance, when clicking links on mobile, deep links direct you to a page’s mobile app instead of their desktop site.
Why it matters
Branch supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users. The company counts companies such as Airbnb, Amazon, Bing, Pinterest, Reddit, Slack, and Tinder as customers. The company has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares. This infusion of capital values the company at roughly $1 billion.
Before you go
- Last week in our briefing, we covered Amobee’s acquisition of Videology. Later that week, we did a Q&A with them for more in-depth insight into what it will mean for the company.
- Launchmetrics raises $50m to help luxury brands use big data to target influencers. The money will enable them to expand internationally into Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
- Customized branding platform Tailor Brands has unveiled an AI-powered social media management tool which creates, schedules, and optimizes content for social media publishing. It provides article, video, and GIF recommendations, and also suggests best publishing times on Facebook, Twitter, and soon Instagram.
- Google launched Smart Campaigns, a new tracking tool which lets advertisers track the performance of their ads, attract potential customers, and monitor the number of times customers have viewed and clicked on the ad.
- HubSpot integrated with Vidyard, a business video platform, to launch a native video function.
- Facebook updates ad metrics to combine web, app, and offline purchase data. Now, “cost per website purchase,” “cost per mobile app purchase,” and “cost per offline purchase” will be merged into a holistic “cost per purchase” metric.
See something we missed? Leave us a comment below!
