In Part 2 of Our Year-Ender 2017 Series, We Bring You the Top Ten Martech Moments From the Year in a Chronological Order

“The true delight is reminiscing and reliving the moment all over again.”

For Martech journalists, 2017 proved to be a momentous year, as we saw many mega-moments of delight that paved the course for the future. In Part 2 of our Year-ender 2017 series, we bring you the top ten Martech moments from the year.

Read More: Trends in Marketing Technology Budgets Could Impact Data Quality and Hygiene

2017 has been that kind of the year where CMOs made the greatest contribution to the adoption of marketing and sales technologies across industries.

Recommended Read: Year-Ender 2017: Top 7 B2B Marketing Philosophies

#10 Snapchat Extends Moat Capabilities to European Advertisers to Boost IPO Plans

Yes, we got this right in the very first week of 2017. A month later, Snapchat announced it’s long awaited IPO. It took Snapchat more than seven months to expand to the European market. In June 2016, Snapchat partnered with Moat to enable Moat Analytics on its video inventory.

Recommended Read: Snap Inc. Will Lead R/GA Marketing Tech Venture Studio with IPG to Herald a New Wave of Tech Empowerment

Post this partnership with Moat, Snapchat’s vertical video format was rebranded as Snap Ads. API inventory on Snap Ads platform allowed third parties to sell their ads as Ads Partners and Creative Partners. Snapchat Ads Partners include Amobee, TubeMogul, Adaptly, 4C, VaynerMedia, Brand Networks, SocialCode, and Unified.

Recommended Read: Why the Biggest Tech IPO in 2017 Adds More Challenges on Snap Inc’s Course

Following the European expansion and IPO, Snap maintained a steady momentum, acquiring location analytics firm Placed, to better measure whether Snapchat’s in-app ads are leading to store visits and offline purchases.

Read Also: Snapchat’s New Update Creates Huge Possibilities for Local SEO

We hope to see Snap create a bigger tech-wave in 2018!

#9 Magento Raises $250 Million Funding

ICYMI: @Magento secures funding from Hillhouse Capital to fuel global expansion. @IR_Magazine w/ more: https://t.co/WXtzWYIqya #omnichannel pic.twitter.com/YdTtBgAQMA

— Adobe Commerce (@AdobeCommerce) January 6, 2017

With this kind of super-funding, Magento announced its entry into the big league of Content Management Systems (CMS). As a growing force in e-commerce, Magento made significant progress in the global market, especially in Asia. Currently, the company competes with SAP Hybris, BigCommerce, Demandware, Shopify Volusion, Drupal Commerce and IBM Websphere. The new funding could see Magento scale up its omnichannel e-commerce solutions globally in the months to come.

Read More: Dropbox IPO Gaining Momentum After the $1 Billion Revenue Announcement

#InspirationalFunding

#8 Salesforce’s Bellevue Engineering & Innovation Hub Turns Operational

Salesforce Opens Engineering & Innovation Hub In Bellevue, Washington – Area Development https://t.co/T7tis4Y4OK

— FortyOak (@FortyOak) February 2, 2017

Salesforce officially announced that the sprawling 70,000 square-feet product development hub in Bellevue is finally operational in January 2017. Then, Salesforce was optimistic about doubling its present headcount, adding at least 250 more employees by 2018. It also aimed to open new offices and innovation hubs in other parts of the world, catering to more than 150,000 customers globally.

Recommended Read: Salesforce India: Largest Innovation Center Outside San Francisco Opens; To Add 1000 New Jobs by 2020 in Hyderabad

Occupying three floors in the 19-storey 929 Office Tower, Bellevue Engineering & Innovation Hub is an architectural masterpiece, inspiring creativity, and collaboration among researchers, engineers, leaders, and customers.

Read More: Bynder Partners with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Provide Feature-Rich Commerce Platform

Inside the new innovation center, artificial intelligence is all set to take an accelerated path. In coming months, workforce from Quip, Krux, SalesforceIQ CRM, Commerce Cloud, Einstein, IoT Cloud, Lightning, and Salesforce1 will converge at Bellevue, WA.

#BellevueEngineering

Read More: Swrve Joins Salesforce’s Journey Builder to Enrich Mobile App Campaigns

#7 Hootsuite Pulls off Mega Acquisition; Adds LiftMetrix to Its Stable to Deliver Enhanced Social ROI

Within two months, Hootsuite made two acquisitions– Ad Espresso and LiftMetrix. The latter proved to be a potent addition to Hootsuite’s already established social media marketing suite. In our TechBytes Series, Nik Pai of LiftMetrix revealed the evolution of his company within Hootsuite.

Nik said, “Hootsuite Impact is the logical evolution of LiftMetrix. Given the growing need for full-stack social media solutions and the demand for transparent, measurable social media efforts that can map back to business impact, we saw opportunities for deeper integration with Hootsuite. In one platform, marketers can now execute, measure, and evaluate their social initiatives.”

Adding LiftMetrix to its stable meant that Hootsuite would see its social selling initiative get more real and productive among the B2B technology influencers.

From @InsideSales On the Value and Future of Social Selling – With Koka Sexton @Hootsuite https://t.co/C3NGuxXt6L #sales pic.twitter.com/MjwoVUGXWu

— Mike Kunkle (@Mike_Kunkle) October 14, 2017

#SocialSelling #SocialMediaMarketing

#6 Informatica Announces New Applications Customer 360 and Relate 360 to Bring Clean, Consistent and Connected Customer Insights

Informatica, by introducing the most cutting-edge update to their Master Data Management (MDM), enhanced the overall marketing performance by providing powerful, actionable, next-gen standardized customer views at any scale. Informatica customers now have the power to uncover the true worth of existing relationships with customers by connecting dots between the context and perspectives.

Informatica Announces New Applications Customer 360 and Relate 360 to Bring Clean, Consistent and Connected Custom … https://t.co/gJgxifVklQ pic.twitter.com/CQDJmNythi

— Ronald van Loon (@Ronald_vanLoon) March 5, 2017

Read Also: WebDAM Starts Offering Machine Learning Capabilities to Simplify Image Search

#DataManagementPlatforms #BigData

#5 Marketo Project Orion, Salesforce-IBM Partnership, and Adobe Experience Cloud

March turned out to be an eventful month for Martech audience as we witnessed some momentous development in customer experience management.

Project Orion

Ten months after Marketo revealed its ambitious platform re-architecture project code-named Project Orion, the leading marketing automation solutions provider finally unveiled it. Marketo announced the availability of its next-gen Engagement Platform, offering marketers a ready-made platform to grow customer LTV through personalized customer engagement at scale. Result: We now see Marketo’s Accelerate Community buzzing with new partners– all focused to deliver top-end customer experience.

Read More: Marketo 2017 Marketing Benchmark Report: Centers of Excellence Key to Boost MarTech Adoption and Maturity

IBM Watson with Salesforce Einstein

IBM announced that it will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf’s new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly.

The unprecedented unification of two AI technologies – IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein now seamlessly connect to an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. The partnership has been forged with an objective of leveraging human intelligence for critical missions and not for time-consuming siloes management. AI will, therefore, make smarter, faster and ROI –specific decisions, freeing humans for ground-breaking innovations.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Like Beethoven, Adobe brought the joy of pure marketing to CMOs with a creative touch, putting various elements like Creative, Document, Marketing Analytics, and Advertising into a single enterprise suite. The creative cloud company announced its Experience Cloud for marketing and analytics that integrated with their Creative and Advertising Clouds, at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

At the same event, the marketing cloud and technology innovation firm also released the Adobe Advertising Cloud, branding it as industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The cloud for cross-channel advertising is the result arising from Adobe’s acquisition of Tube Mogul in December 2016.

Read More: Revel Partners with Adobe to “Keep Innovation Flywheel Spinning” in B2B Digital Transformation

#4 Oracle Content and Experience Cloud Debuts at the Modern Customer Experience 2017

Oracle introduced the Oracle Content and Experience Cloud at its annual CX event. The new cloud delivers a single cloud-native platform for content production, management, and delivery across all lines of business. It provides unique capabilities to support a variety of business needs, from employee and customer engagement to sales enablement and business development.

Read Also: Oracle’s Moat Receives ABC Certification for Video Viewability Measurement

#Oracle_CX_Cloud Suite helps companies leverage the customer experience to differentiate, innovate, and improve business results. It is the most complete, integrated, and extensible customer experience solution available in the market.#IMPACTEMEA#TOMORROW #CLOUD #IMPACT #TODAY pic.twitter.com/53t2AsOBfR

— Impact EMEA (@impactemea) December 20, 2017

Oracle Content and Experience Cloud is uniquely capable of addressing the needs of both the business user and IT, enabling them to work together to deliver modern, engaging digital experiences (DX).

Recommended Read: Oracle Marketing Cloud Adds WeChat Integration to Make Inroads into App-Based Personalization on Social

The platform integrates with the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud Suite, an integrated suite of cloud applications that empower organizations to take a smarter approach to customer experience management and business transformation initiatives.

Read More: Oracle Cloud Platform Innovates to Power Big Data at Scale

#3 ABM Funding Rounds: Demandbase, Terminus, and Mintigo

In May, Demandbase raised $65 million, proving that Account-based marketing platforms are now a “funding magnet”. Earlier that month, Mintigo scooped $10 million in Series E. And, Terminus also garnered a similar amount– $10.3 million. In fact, Terminus later revealed that it has seen 170% growth in the past 12 months and continues to solidify its position as the leader in the high growth ABM category.

Artificial Intelligence powering ABM platforms is a certain connecting here, helping them turn into funding magnets in 2017.

#Martech Funding Hack: @Mintigo is successful in proving that #AI is much more than just a slogan. https://t.co/qX7R8X6rzq #abm #Predictive

— MarTech Series (@MarTechSeries) May 15, 2017

At the time of Mintigo’s funding announcement, Kobi Samboursky, Founder & Managing Partner at Glilot Capital Partners, said, “Artificial intelligence can dramatically improve the bottom line of leading businesses in multiple categories. Mintigo’s list of big happy customers proves the superiority of its technology. We are proud to join the winning team of Mintigo.”

#2 Unveiling Artsai, The First Artificial Intelligence Solution to Consolidate the Marketing Stack

Artsai, is user-centric & focuses on optimizing the whole customer #digital journey rather than on disconnected #marketing functions, shares Yuri Khidekel, CEO, Artsai @tryartsai https://t.co/679397jbix pic.twitter.com/MD6CPCF2Hc

— MarTech Series (@MarTechSeries) December 1, 2017

With the launch of Artsai, we witnessed how AI helps in uniquely consolidating and disrupting the MarTech

industry by vertically integrating the current piecemeal model. Artsai’s adaptive marketing automation platform is the first and only solution that uses artificial intelligence to address the whole user digital journey and make the entire marketing stack efficient, rather than focusing on incremental improvements to ad performance.

Recommended Read: Cision Unveils Exclusive Influencer Identification, Monitoring and Measurement Capabilities

Artsai’s patent-pending adaptive marketing automation technology is powered by an interconnected artificial intelligence marketing stack and performs multiple marketing tasks including new customer acquisition, user retention, re-targeting, re-engagement, app monetization, and content optimization.

#1 MarTech Market Worth $34.3 Billion a Year

Some interesting research into the digital media market and MarTech done by @moorestephens and @WARCEditors. #adtech bubble has burst but #martech #brandtech #contenttech will experience significant growth. Download https://t.co/9Sq35Ttfwc pic.twitter.com/0ssvzBscZt

— VIDA (@VIDA_VOLUME) November 28, 2017

Just before DMEXCO 2017, Moore Stephens announced the launch of a research report into the US and UK MarTech industry. The research which covered 500 marketing agencies revealed that–

• Brands are spending 16% of their marketing budget on marketing technology
• The MarTech market could be worth more than $34 billion
• Brands expect MarTech budgets to rise by 10% in next year
• 50% of brands don’t have the tools they need

Recommended Read: DMEXCO 2017 Roundup for Marketers: Marc Pritchard, Data Science, AI and “The Art of Narrative Disruption”

According to the report, marketers are most likely to be using a MarTech tool for email, with 85% currently doing so. The majority also use social media and CRM tools, whereas experience optimization and collaboration tools are currently used by around a third (37%). However, both of the latter are set for a significant rise. The survey reveals an additional quarter will invest in experience optimization and collaboration tools in the next year.

Hey, DM's, check this out… Seeking Solutions and Going Global: A View from dmexco 2017 – MarTech Series https://t.co/5PPGwMxfwP

— Gabe Hernandez – The Witness (@MrGabeHernandez) October 12, 2017

Touchdown 2018

It is clear from the report that the businesses seek greater authority and a sense of control—a key driver to invest in MarTech. While MarTech industry continues to grow at a blitzkrieg pace, future investments would be largely driven by product innovations relevant to the company’s maturity in adopting technologies for marketing, sales, and advertisement.

Read More: Five Things That Marketers Need to STOP Doing in 2018

From Big Data, the market has equivocally and in unison accepted that “real-time, right data’ is far more penetrative than anything else in the business. As customer data makes a daunting approach towards establishing itself as “digital currency” to reckon with, marketing technology platforms have more to cheer about in 2018. All this, thanks to a series of phenomenal “martech’ moments that occurred in 2017…

Recommended Read: LiveRamp and Criteo Partner to Enhance People-Based Marketing Campaigns for Omnichannel Engagement