Marketo Might Be Looking For A Buyer; CNN Plans To Let Advertisers Use Its Data

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Marketo On The Market?

Bloomberg is hearing whispers that Marketo might be seeking a buyer. At least, that’s one of the “strategic alternatives” it’s hired Morgan Stanley to help consider. Bloomberg indicates this activity in the early stages and of course no one at Marketo or Morgan Stanley commented. If Marketo gets sold, it would join a long list of acquired marketing automation companies that includes Silverpop (IBM), Responsys (Oracle), ExactTarget (Salesforce) and Neolane (Adobe). Though it’s premature to speculate on who might acquire Marketo we’ll do it anyway. Chatter at the Salesforce Connections conference this week in Atlanta indicated SAP might be interested. SAP, after all, has the ecommerce platform hybris and linking it with Marketo could be an enticing proposition. That’s assuming that SAP wants to get into the very crowded marketing cloud space at all. More.

CNN’s Data

CNN will begin letting advertisers leverage its first-party data as part of a cross-platform monetization plan, The Drum reports. By sharing reporting and analytics on its audiences across all of its distribution platforms, CNN says it can help advertisers create better native ad experiences, deeper targeting and extension opportunities. CNN’s cross-platform campaigns will be delivered programmatically and the publisher will rely on header bidding to drive yield. The network is also banking on its branded content initiative, Great Big Story. More.

WaPo’s SaaS Model

The Washington Post is finding a new way to monetize. CIO Shailesh Prakash said licensing its Arc CMS through a SaaS model could open a $100M market, Poynter reported. Nine professional news organizations are already signed on, as journalists seek platform advantages in the changing digital environment. “You end up with newsrooms that have six, seven, eight systems, with a large print footprint in many cases, and then all these hodgepodge of other solutions,” Prakash said. “And there you have the engineer’s nightmare.” Arc would give less tech-savvy publishers the tools to manage an online publication for a starting fee of $2,000, increasing based on the amount of data used. More.

The Matrix

According to app retention data from Flurry, apps in the health and fitness category performed highest in user retention on both Android and iPhone, keeping 50% of their users for more than 30 days. Card and casino gaming apps were used most frequently on Android at six times per week, and did well on iPhone too (weather apps slightly edged them out). Overall, the app ecosystem has mushroomed from 1.4 million apps to more than 3 million apps since the last time this study was run in 2012. Read it.

Man + Machine

Facebook may be “largely ruled by algorithms,” writes The Wall Street Journal, “but science goes only so far, and intuition plays a role as well.” Lots of things can be be both automated and adaptive to real-time fluctuations – someone with a slow network will see text-based content in their news feed while higher bandwidth yields more video – and others have to be curated by live reviewers. “Facebook’s news feed team needs a human touch because ranking based purely on algorithms would feel unnatural, the same way that robots today do not appear quite human.” Related: Facebook addresses Trending Topics scandal.