I last wrote about content tech this past spring in a blog about Adobe Summit announcements featuring AI for content, data, and customer journey innovations. This week — along with a brief respite from a midsummer heat wave — came news of an acquisition in a key, albeit niche, area of content tech. In a move combining two content engagement point solutions, PathFactory announced its acquisition of Uberflip.
I wrote a landscape report on this space last year in anticipation of potential growth as B2B organizations struggled to overcome barriers to delivering personalized experiences. The core martech vendors — web content managemetn systems (CMSes), digital asset management systems (DAMs), and digital experience platforms (DXPs) — were expanding their capabilities but not necessarily the content personalization that B2B organizations need to deliver complex, information-rich buyer journey experiences over long sales cycles. Still, the stand-alone solutions failed to capture enough market share to move beyond niche status — both PathFactory and Uberflip have served customers for more than a decade. All of that changed, however, with generative AI (genAI) and other AI-powered technology capabilities. With the ability to not only generate custom content in response to audience signals but also to architect complex personalized journeys and provide the intelligence and analytics needed to continually tune, the technology is becoming available to deliver the holy grail: personalized content experiences, at scale.
The announcement indicates that the combined entity will deliver personalized buyer journeys through “industry-leading content engagement analytics and complementary expertise in content experiences.” PathFactory cites the right trifecta of ingredients by way of combination with Uberflip: Content + data + genAI = next-gen B2B buyer experience. It’s unclear whether the focus of the acquisition is technology, resources, or customers — or all three — but joining forces makes sense, given what these previous rivals are up against.
The fact is, core martech vendors — web CMSes, DAMs, and DXPs, specifically — are well positioned to deliver these capabilities and, as evidenced by Adobe’s most recent AI innovation, already are. I’m reminded of a conversation I had years ago with one of Uberflip’s founders, who said, “Let’s face it: Any web CMS could actually do what we do, but they don’t, because their focus is elsewhere.” Now, as they rush to ramp up AI to support innovation, it’s becoming a whole lot easier for those big vendors to get on board, add these personalization capabilities through organic growth or acquisition, and capture additional market share, as they also reduce the likelihood that organizations will choose to add a point solution instead. After all, organizations already struggle with complexity when it comes to delivering personalization. Forrester’s State Of Digital In B2B Marketing, 2023, survey found that 33% of B2B organizations use 7–10 discrete technologies to execute personalization — and 27% use even more.
Delivering more personalized content experiences and leveraging AI to make it happen is likely on your to-do list — in Forrester’s July 2023 Artificial Intelligence Pulse Survey, almost 50% of organizations said that personalizing customer interactions with genAI-enhanced experiences will be their most important use case for the technology over the next 12 months.
So if you’re seeking these capabilities, evaluate the new PathFactory and other point solutions, but at the same time, take a hard look at your existing martech before adding more. Are you fully utilizing capabilities that support personalization already in your tech stack? What’s on the road maps for the tech you own today? And if you took on AI-driven personalization capabilities, will you have the resources, expertise, and data strategy to support them? Consider these questions, and watch this space for more M&A activity, perhaps even while we fan ourselves through another heat wave this summer!
