Another CMP gets swallowed up (Percolate, By Seismic), and what it means to you
Summary
This is the second major acquisition of a CMP by a larger technology company supporting B2B marketers after Upland Software bought Kapost for $50 million in May this year. The perennial challenge for CMPs (and one weve discussed at length before) was that the back-office efficiencies of a CMP were hard to justify independent of where the content was published. So were seeing CMPs get absorbed or developed entirely within channel-specific technologies (such as sales or social) and then -- protected by that clear benefit -- extend to support and orchestrate other channels. At least one CMP CEO believes that a back-office-focused offering can succeed but also sees it in the context of merging into the marketing resource management (MRM) space (which Percolate had also done to some success). Notably, this MRM space has been its own slow growth story, which further cements a thesis that many marketing organizations still dont value operational efficiencies around content -- or at least not enough to justify a large martech investment; many still want their agencies to sweat that stuff.
