Vendors Are Investing In Training Programs For Marketers; Microsoft's Stock Is Up Almost 40%

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School Of Programmatic

As marketers take programmatic in-house, they’re calling on vendors for training. Google, Adobe and Quantcast are all investing in educational programs to help marketers understand programmatic buying, reports Yuyu Chen for Digiday. Adobe, which helped MGM Resorts International bring programmatic in-house [AdExchanger coverage], has five employees and eight regional trainers dedicated to educating marketers on programmatic, from basic terminology to learning how to use the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It’s a nice way for vendors to get on the ground floor at marketing orgs and get them hooked on their stacks. “The investment in programmatic training is revenue-effective because it goes into sales generators downstream,” said Rich Wing, global director of sales training at Quantcast. More.

Brand Building In 2017

The fashion and shopping publisher Racked takes a look at Wunderbrow, an eyebrow cosmetics startup, and how the company was able to morph into a category leader under the noses of the world’s largest makeup brands. Wunderbrow’s founders had no product or cosmetics background, but they brought data and tech savvy that helped them excel in the mobile world of customer acquisition. Wunderbrow is the most popular makeup product on Amazon and a ferocious Facebook/Instagram presence, dropping about $2.5 million per month on the platform. More.

Microsoft FTW

Microsoft stock is up almost 40% in the past year and the company said on Wednesday that 500 million devices now run Windows 10 – up from 400 million just eight months ago. The same day, it debuted new video and image recognition advertising products that compete with initiatives at Google and Amazon, Reuters reports. And then there’s Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise cloud, which is throwing elbows at Oracle like the good old days. Throw in a moonshot involving drones, mosquitoes and DNA sequencing, and you’ve got the ingredients for a roaring Redmond comeback.

Why Walled Gardens Exist

One of the difficult things about regulating the “Frightful Five” (Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) is that their collective services are beloved, if not an outright essential aspect of modern life to many consumers. Practically everyone is trapped by one or two or more of these tech leaders, each a “warden of a very comfortable corporate prison,” writes Farhad Manjoo at The New York Times. “We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy.” More.

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