Email vendor consolidation continues apace with the announcement that Sinch AB, cloud communications provider for mobile engagement, is acquiring Pathwire -- an email delivery platform that includes the Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid brands -- for roughly $1.925 billion. 

This price includes $925 million in cash and 51 million new shares in Sinch.

With this acquisition, Sinch’s annualized revenue run rate will be $2.3 billion, and the employee headcount will grow to 4,000.

The purchase -- coming three months after Pathwire’s own acquisition of Email on Acid -- establishes Stockholm-based Sinch as one of the few global CPaaS providers that can deliver quality at scale across messaging, voice and transactional and marketing email, claims Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO.

The move also occurs just two weeks after the announcement that Intuit is acquiring Mailchimp for $12 billion. 

Pathwire’s customers include such brands such as Lyft, Microsoft, Iterable, DHL and Kajabi.

Mailgun is a product for developers seeking to incorporate automated email messages into workflows through APIs. 

Mailjet offers a drag-and-drop email builder and suite of APIs that allows users to engage with customers through the entire lifecycle of an email.

Email On Acid’s software-as-a-service allows users to view how emails will render in Gmail, Yahoo and other email platforms, and via mobile desktop and the web, and it also provides analytics. 

The transaction is subject to the usual closing conditions, including merger-control filing to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. 

It's been a while since I've written about media addiction, but a new study came into my inbox that illustrates why Apple is the Purdue Pharma of mobile marketing. No, it isn't peddling opioids, but the research suggests that as far as consumer dependence on their iPhones has gotten, they might as well be selling OxyContin.

The study from Solitaired, distributor of digital versions of classic games like Solitaire, Yahtzee, and Mahjong, asked a panel of 667 American iPhone users to estimate how much time they spend on, and how often they pick up, their phones each day, and then compared it with actual documented data from their iPhone's iOS Screen Time application. It found that, on average, iPhone users underestimate the time they spend daily on the device by about 35%.

And they underestimate the number of times they pick up their iPhone each day by about 60%.

The study shows that Apple consumers' "relationship with [their iPhones] is complex and often compulsive."

The study questions the underlying "health" of those relationships, and goes on to note that the No. 1 culprit in media addiction may not necessarily be the device, but some of the most popular apps people install and interact with, obsessively (see data below).

"Not surprisingly, social media rules the day -- or at least a couple hours of it," the report notes, adding, "The average person spends one hour and 23 minutes on social media every single day. According to our respondents, the apps we use the longest right now are TikTok and Twitter, both tied for an average of 1.6 hours per day."

Utilities like browsers or messaging services aside, most of the biggest time suckers are social media apps like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which depend on advertising revenues.

And while Madison Avenue isn't marketing those addictions explicitly, it certainly is providing the economic basis for them to exist.

Google announced new applications for its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) technology, including multimodal search with Google Lens, Related topics in videos, and new search result features today during its virtual Search On event.

These features will provide users with new ways to search and give marketers opportunities to expand on the ways they reach consumers.

Some of the features will support holiday campaigns and shopping, while others will improve on the way consumers use search to find information and local goods. 

Pandu Nayak, vice president of search at Google, talked about ways the company is integrating MUM technology with Google Lens. The app enables users to take a photo and add a query to find answers.

Some answers may relate to solving problems like fixing a broken camping stove or a mountain bike. MUM will allow a consumer to point the mobile phone camera at an object, such as an unknown bicycle part, take a picture and upload it through Lens. Google returns images. The consumer types in “how to fix it,” and the query pulls answers from blogs, forums and websites, making optimization much more important.

Consumers, early next year, will have an option to take a picture of a pattern on a shirt, and ask Google to find the same pattern on another article of clothing like socks. The query returns stores in which the consumers can find the item locally.

The technology also will identify and serve up related topics not explicitly mentioned in a video. The MUM-based experience will launch in the coming weeks.

Topic features supported by MUM that will serve up in search engine results pages also will be released in the coming months. They include Things to know, as well as features to Refine and broaden searches.

The Things to know feature lists aspects of the topic for which the user searched. Things to know can enable users to see the different dimensions other people typically search for, which may help them get to the information they are looking for faster. And a visually browsable results page gears toward searches where the user needs inspiration or wants to explore information visually.

Just in time for the holidays in the U.S., Google today launched a shoppable experience that aims to make it easier to browse for apparel on mobile from search results. It’s powered by Google’s Shopping Graph, a real-time dataset of products, inventory and merchants with more than 24 billion listings.

There’s an in-stock filter to see if nearby stores have specific items on their shelves. It launches today in English in the U.S., the UK, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Product discovery is the biggest ecommerce problem brands might not know they have.

Difficulty in finding the products on a retailer’s site is one of the top reasons for abandoning the search or "bouncing" to another website, according to survey results released today.

Nearly 73% of consumers participating in a survey by Quibit, which focuses on artificial intelligence and personalization, cited the difficulty of finding a product as the top reason for abandoning a site without making a purchase. The findings released Wednesday were fielded in July 2021.

Of the 1,500 U.S. and UK consumers who participated, 61% cited poor navigation as another top reason for bouncing or abandoning a site. Some 6.3% of consumers reported looking for products page by page to find what they need, rather than using the retailer’s site-search feature.

Nearly nine in 10 shoppers feel overwhelmed by product choices presented to them on a retailer’s site, according to previously released data. It’s well known that brands only have a couple of pages to grab and maintain a shopper’s attention.

Customer loyalty is now more difficult than ever to come by. There’s a lot of competition.

Nearly 30% of consumers plan to buy more online this holiday season compared to 2020, with 54.5% of shoppers expecting to shop as much online during the 2021 holiday shopping season.

Consumers are overwhelmed with products on websites from Nordstrom to Home Depot, many of which now drop ship directly from the manufacturer.

The average product catalog contains 13,000 products, according to Quibit’s research. Digital merchandisers and ecommerce teams are under constant pressure to optimize product performance -- constantly updating product catalogs, adjusting page layouts, and sifting through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of product performance data.

In fact, 88% of shoppers say they are faced with an overwhelming number of product choices.

It’s not about improving visibility for large amounts of products. It’s more about using AI to personalize the selection. Search is about enabling consumers to find a few select products, among the thousands of products, that are most relevant to them.

Some 42% of U.S. consumers expect products recommendations to be tailored to their individual preferences, yet 37.1% said product recommendations are rarely tailored to them.

There is no room for missteps when it comes to customer service.

Shipping and return policies, at 54.5%, and lack of reviews, at 52%, were also high on the list of reasons why shoppers leave the brand’s site or abandon a purchase.

The data also shows that mobile shopping appears to be more popular with U.S. respondents than in the UK, with 40.7% of U.S. consumers reporting their preference to shop by smartphone versus 30.4% in the UK.

LINK Agency, a creative shop specializing in TikTok advertising, has launched a "scholarship program" to train creators in optimizing the platform.

The six-month program will school three “budding ‘TikTokers’” on the state-of-the-art expertise developed by LINK.

LINK founders Francisco Lopes and Francisco Schmidberger, along with an industry leader committee, will select three winners based on the applicants’ needs, their passions, and their commitment to content creation.

According to Lopes, the ideal candidate will “have ambition to get to the next level” and will be “putting all their focus on social media.” 

“We’re a creator-first company and believers in the long-term potential of the creator economy,” said Lopes. “As someone that works with creators daily, we want to empower them and continue to increase their access and ability to be successful entrepreneurs of their own content.” 

Scholarship winners will take part in weekly one-on-one meetings with Lopes and Schmidberger to help develop their career opportunities, negotiate brand deals, and retain ongoing advice and resources. 

Having worked closely with content creators in the past -- part of an app they had developed that linked creators with one another -- Lopes and Schmidberger observed some major issues.

Newfound influencers were highly vulnerable in Los Angeles -- having left home, or having dropped out of college to pursue their dreams of social media stardom.

A lack of emotional support, business education, or experience made newfound influencers easy targets for companies looking to take advantage of young talent. 

“Many of them got screwed by different situations,” says Lopes. “By managers -- by going into business with the wrong people -- by not having the right access or guidance.” 

Influencer burnout is also a factor that prevents creators from having a fruitful long-term career. 

“There are creators that come here and especially on TikTok, they get very famous very quickly,” adds Lopes. “Then they have a lot of pressure to keep posting content, and at some point their engagement will start decreasing -- it happens to everybody on TikTok sooner or later.” 

Lopes and Schmidberger have both seen creators turn down brand deals due to mental breakdowns.

Still, they want to make it clear that while they are not licensed therapists, and are only providing career support, they hope the scholarship program raises awareness for the creator economy industry as a whole. 

Along with avoiding burnout, the main topics that Lopes and Schmidberger will cover are maintaining consistency in creating content, connection with other creators, how to successfully transfer to a different platform, and seizing potential opportunities outside of the direct social media space.

Lopes and Schmidberger believe TikTok is worth their focus because of its unique capability to entertain people. “It’s all about making entertaining content,” says Schmidberger, “and we believe we’re blurring the lines between entertainment and advertising.”

Lopes adds that “there’s still a lot of potential to develop in terms of marketing, paid ads, performance-driven initiatives. They’re also launching the Shopify integration.”

“Touching base on our initial vision of empowering creators,” says Lopes, “we thought that now that we have a marketing agency, and we're working with bigger brands, maybe now we can share some of our insight with creators, completely pro bono.”

Lopes and Schmidberger anticipate that this initiative will be the first of many, and already have views to expand and develop the program in the coming years. 

Fintech company SKUx wants to change the way brands deliver discounts to consumers, and in turn, increase returns from performance marketing.

SKUx's technology, announced Tuesday with the launch of the company, centers on a partnership with Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed public ledger that will provide a secure network for logging and verifying all transactions and data running on its platform.

Tracking the supply chain of an offer or discount increases trust, said Bobby Tinsley, co-founder-executive vice president of SKUx.

He started the company with several others in 2018 to stop fraud related to discounts and offers through advertising. “It’s radically different than a paper coupon,” he said. “The brand also can see all the data and analytics through the platform.”

The platform is the technology layer that supports retailers, brands, and marketing services companies with a serialized and a trackable payment-based technology called SKUPay. It’s aimed at increasing trust and transparency for special offers and discounts electronically.

The SKUx platform requires no special point of sale integration, and enables daily settlements for retailers. The discounts can be distributed through email, SMS text, QR code, social media, mobile, on-pack, display and other types of media.

The SKUx Smart Incentives platform, running on the Hedera public distributed ledger network, tracks and records all transactional data as a secure hash on the Hedera public ledger.

The technology also includes heat maps that tell advertisers where the discounts are being used in real time.

“When you’re distributing coupons, you’re going on historical data, hoping you don’t under or over redeem discounts,” he said.

Tinsley said brands are testing the platform in the U.S., but the plan is to expand internationally. He declined to cite the names of the brands.

“We are not part of the marketing campaign, but rather the payment system,” Tinsley said.

Cinnabon wants its fans to get even sweeter on those sticky buns, introducing its first-ever app and loyalty program. 

The chain says the app will offer a rewards program, which will enable contactless delivery or in-bakery pickup with skip-the-line privileges. And while it’s built its business on that signature aroma drifting into the mall food court, it’s now hoping to win more in the digital realm. 

Most of the company’s 1,200 locations are located in high-traffic areas, including shopping centers, airports, train stations, travel plazas, entertainment centers and military posts. But in upcoming ads, including its holiday campaign, “we’re encouraging customers to order through the website to get their favorite crave-able rolls delivered directly to them,” says Michael Alberici, director of brand marketing. 

It’s promoting the new app with ads running on social media, including YouTube, as well as geofenced display banners and paid search. The chain “is looking to foster its relationship with its most loyal customers, targeting our frequent guests, hoping to give them easy access to the brand,” he says in an email to QSR Land.

Downloading the app automatically earns fans four BonBites, as well as a small Cold Brew on their birthday. And for the first week, it’s waiving delivery fees.

Cinnabon is owned by Focus Brands, which also owns such brands as Auntie Anne’s, Carvel, Jamba and Moe’s Southwest Grill and Seattle’s Best Coffee.

Focus, based in Atlanta, also announced multiple changes within its corporate marketing ranks. Mike Freeman moves up to chief brand officer of McAlister’s Deli, from vice president of operations. And it’s promoted Karyn Sarago to senior vice president of marketing for the specialty category, from vice president of marketing for Cinnabon. Danielle Porto Parra moves to senior vice president of marketing for the Restaurant Category,

And Nicolle DuBose moves to vice president of marketing for Schlotzsky’s, from the same role at Carvel.