Marketers are spending on tech, too. According to an April report by Forrester Research, US marketers will increase their investment in marketing technology by 27.1% over the next four years, spending more than $122 billion on marketing tech by 2022.
Ad tech investments have also been on the rise this summer. While the investments are varied and range from funding rounds to acquisitions, ad tech firms like MediaMath, Integral Ad Science, AppNexus and Acxiom have each struck deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases billions, within the past few months.
On a smaller scale, an emerging category of ad tech vendor—customer data platforms (CDPs)—also has gotten investors’ attention. Since April, at least seven CDPs have raised funding or been acquired by larger firms.