The Wednesday Stack: Ads, Blockchain, ABM, and More
Facebook is being slammed with another lawsuit — this time, focused on political advertising. Washington State has filed a suit claiming the social media platform allegedly violated state campaign finance laws with their failure to properly inform voters about political ad buyers. Google was also named in the suit.
Matt Hedberg, GM, professional services division, Semcasting, weighed in on the case, and the potential impact it could have on political advertising:
“Currently, most of Facebook and Google's respective changes to privacy and retention policies should allow them to satisfy Washington state law with minor changes, so I imagine these cases will be settled out of court. My main fear is that with federal legislation stalled, other states will use this example and seek to regulate their own markets. While Facebook and Google are the defendants in this particular case, a future of patchwork laws will only serve to benefit large incumbents who possess the necessary resources to navigate a broken system.
“We all can and should strive to be more transparent, but that task only becomes more difficult if the rules are not clearly established. Washington state is not known as a focus of national political attention, and the almost minimal spend on these two platforms since 2008 bears that out. Who is truly being harmed if Facebook decides to place more stringent rules on advertising in the state? A higher barrier to entry will benefit incumbent politicians at the expense of small outside challengers.”
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I don't know how many Forrester waves there are altogether — seems like an oceanful — but now there's a new one: "The Forrester New Wave: ABM Platforms." And as of Q2 2018, Demandbase is ahead of the pack, almost alone in the leader category (with MRP and Jabmo — the latter with a very small market presence — just tiptoeing across the line which divides leaders from strong performers).
Among the strong performers, Lattice Engines and Engagio, both written about here at DMN, with TechTarget, despite significant market presence, slipping into the contender category. "Demandbase leads the pack with robust complementary capabilities. The company covers most of the critical steps of the ABM process and has strong partnerships with leading marketing cloud vendors, a compelling vision of AI-powered ABM, and an aggressive and comprehensive road map." But, "Demandbase still has a few gaps to fill, even where commodity solutions already exist. Adding table-stakes functionality such as lead-to-account matching or corporate hierarchies would strengthen its appeal as the platform for all-things ABM and reduce the integration burden a small but meaningful amount for Demandbase users."
14 vendors were evaluated for the report.
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Also tumbling into the inbox recently:
Where will DMN be next? We're looking at Salesforce Connections 2018 in the Windy City. Say hi if you see us.