TMW #033 | Stripe as commerce infrastructure, no-code and enterprise marketing, decision making and data

Mar 21, 2021

Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I try to look to where the industry is going and make sense of it all.

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Good afternoon to new subscribers from Los Angeles, Melbourne, Detroit and Sydney!

Welcome to #033. Itā€™s time to shake off the Sunday scaries and get ahead of whatā€™s happening in marketing tech. I look at Stripeā€™s $95 Billion valuation, the disparity of no-code tools between startups and enterprise business, exactly how leading brands use data to make decisions, plus the 20+ or so links from everything thatā€™s important this week.

šŸ‘‡ Ā Hereā€™s everything youā€™ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

āœ Commentary

šŸ’³ Payments as infrastructure, Stripe as cornerstone. If you think about the world wide web as a city - interconnected roads, buildings, pipes, sewers, electricity, train stations and stores you can start pointing out what makes the ā€œinternet cityā€ run and when it comes to payments, Stripe is about as central to a city as roads and trains. This week Stripe raised a staggering $600 Million, positioning the company at a $95 Billion dollar valuation - the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley. Stripe is behind the majority of credit card transactions on platforms like Shopify, powering millions of online stores with payments infrastructure while clipping that 1.7% + $0.30 for more than 250 million requests a day. While the pandemic has brought about a surge in e-commerce adoption - with more than 200,000 European retailers brought onto the Stripe platform - Ā thereā€™s more at work here.

Stripeā€™s business is now effectively larger than the entire global ecommerce industry when the company first started and itā€™s been able to win out against competitors like PayPal and Square for this reason - they figured out early that online shopping will become a mostly commoditized and decentralised industry throughout the decade and that all of those businesses will need easy, scalable and merchant-first infrastructure. By taking a cut of every transaction, and by staying a private company, Stripe has been slowly building essential infrastructure on how transactions are done online while riding the coattails of the rise of now household names like Shopify. This proves that services that manage one small aspect of the value chain can have enormous industry consequences, and while more tech companies build solutions for how people pay, like Fast checkout and others, brands are becoming increasingly reliant on these companies to innovate for the customer. Link

šŸ“ˆChart Of The Week Ā 

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šŸ“° Latest Developments

Facebook is launching a newsletter product. Itā€™s happening for real, Facebook is getting into the newsletter game. Not a lot of detail outside of the press release here. But whatā€™s interesting is that Facebookā€™s algorithm-lead feeds across its products are what is driving people to create newsletters in the first place. Link

Sephora placed first in personalisation 4th time in a row. The brand, a luxury beauty retailer has been awarded the top position in the annual retail personalisation index. The brand has mastered cross channel personalisation in ways that many other retailers havenā€™t begun to start thinking about. Link

šŸ“š Reading

Disneyā€™s next step? Programmatic advertising. While Disney+ has attracted millions of subscribers in a very short time they are now turning their attention to addressable TV and leveraging the digital audiences for programmatic trading. Link

In the future, email marketing wonā€™t use databases. Martech Today has put together a number of predictions around how marketing teams use technology throughout this decade. One of those predictions is database-less email marketing technologies that are highly flexible and pull data from a variety of sources reflexively. Link


šŸ”¢ Data & Insights

Podcasting statistics. 80 million Americans listen to podcasts weekly, which is one of the most diverse channels in audience demographics. Heaps to unpack here in the Edison research ā€œinfinite dialā€ report. Link

Online gaming revenue. Some predictions put revenue generated from in-game loot boxes (packages you can purchase online that enables new game features) is set to exceed $25 Billion by 2025. Thatā€™s about half of the global CRM market. There are things happening in games that are totally overlooked by marketers. Link


šŸ’” Ideas

The ecommerce tech landscape for Shopify. Shopify is building their own technology ecosystem of apps, integrations and features. Thereā€™s really nothing quite Ā like it. Someoneā€™s created a landscape map of all the products and what they do. Link

Lagos, Africaā€™s a new technology hub. Welcome to a new locus of tech startups where in 2019 Nigerian companies like Flutterwave, a payments company, have secured more than $600 million in capital funding, with some startups reaching unicorn status. Link


āœØ Weird and Wonderful

Instagram for Kids. Facebook is launching an app that would be especially designed for children. This is in response to data that suggests that children have shown an increased interest in social networking. Along with this Instagram has also enabled a feature that will not allow adults to message teens on the app - something they should have done years ago. Link

Losing control of a FB group. The NYTs cooking team built a cooking Facebook group of thousands of users, they have now relinquished control of the group to others and stepped away as things spin out of control. Link

An app for sexual consent? An Australian police commissioner suggested that an app be developed that would allow women to give their sexual consent. The blowback was significant. How could an app ever solve on sexual violence? Ā Link


Stay Curious,

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.

Juan Mendoza

Juan Mendoza is an expert in researching global media, marketing, data, and technology trends. He is the CEO of The Martech Weekly, a media and research brand with subscribers in over 65 countries.

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