Marketing Tech Weekly — March 28, 2026
This week in MarTech, AI continues reshaping audience targeting with the launch of Cognitiv's AudienceGPT tool, while Forrester's new Tech Tide™ report gives marketing leaders a framework for evaluating B2C technology investments amid rapid category shifts. Meanwhile, email marketers are being urged to abandon traditional open-and-click metrics in favor of three new signals — disaffection, replies, and trust — as the industry redefines what performance actually looks like.
Marketing Tech Weekly — March 28, 2026
Ad Platform Updates
No fresh, first-party ad platform announcements (Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn) published after March 21, 2026 were available in this week's research results. The most recent official blog posts from those platforms predate the coverage window. Check platform newsrooms directly for any mid-week updates.
New Tools & Launches
Cognitiv — AudienceGPT
- Category: Programmatic advertising / AI audience targeting
- What it does: Uses deep learning to identify high-intent audiences in real time based on consumer behavior and customer journey signals.
- Why it matters: Bridges the gap between static audience segments and dynamic, behavior-driven targeting — giving advertisers a smarter alternative to third-party cookie-based cohorts.
- Pricing: Not disclosed
Bandwidth + Agentforce Contact Center Partnership
- Category: Unified communications / contact center AI
- What it does: Bandwidth, a global cloud communications platform, has partnered with Salesforce's newly launched Agentforce Contact Center to deliver integrated voice and messaging capabilities inside the Agentforce environment.
- Why it matters: Closes a persistent gap between CRM-native AI agents and real-world telephony infrastructure — enabling brands to run AI-assisted customer conversations without leaving their Salesforce stack.
- Pricing: Not disclosed
HyperDev — Generative AI Coding Platform (v1 Launch)
- Category: Developer tools / AI-assisted software prototyping
- What it does: Founded by former OpenAI and Google AI experts, HyperDev's Version 1 platform lets non-technical founders, marketers, and entrepreneurs prototype and launch software using generative AI.
- Why it matters: Lowers the barrier to building custom MarTech tools and automations for teams without dedicated engineering resources — a growing priority as composable stacks gain traction.
- Pricing: Not disclosed
Growth Playbook
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Rethink your email KPIs — opens and clicks are no longer enough: MarTech argues this week that email performance measurement is being fundamentally redefined. Three new metrics are emerging as the signals that actually matter: disaffection (tracking when subscribers disengage or mark messages as unwanted), replies (a proxy for genuine two-way engagement), and trust (whether subscribers actively seek out your messages). The argument is that inbox providers and AI-powered email clients are increasingly weighting these behavioral signals when deciding deliverability — making traditional open-rate chasing not just insufficient but potentially counterproductive. Marketers who ignore this shift risk declining reach even with healthy open rates.
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SEO's biggest internal threat: your own organization: Search Engine Land published a pointed piece this week noting that fragmented data, AI over-reliance, and poor cross-functional collaboration are quietly undermining SEO performance for many enterprise teams — more so than any external algorithm change. The prescription: invest in organizational alignment between SEO, content, product, and engineering teams before doubling down on tooling.
Industry Moves
- Forrester publishes Tech Tide™ for B2C Marketing Technology: Forrester released its latest Tech Tide™ report this week, providing marketing leaders with a structured view of B2C MarTech category maturity and investment priorities. The report is designed to help CMOs and marketing operations teams cut through vendor hype by mapping tools against data connectivity, use-case clarity, and decision-making speed — a direct response to what Forrester calls the growing "reality check" moment for MarTech stacks. Financial terms were not disclosed; the report is available to Forrester subscribers.
- CMSWire: The 5-Step MarTech Reality Check gains traction among marketing leaders: A CMSWire framework published this week for evaluating MarTech investments — focusing on data connectivity, defined use cases, and decision speed rather than feature lists — is drawing attention from practitioners navigating tool consolidation. The piece reflects a broader industry trend toward disciplined MarTech auditing before scaling ad spend or expanding stacks. No acquisition or funding news attached.
What to Watch Next Week
- AI-driven audience targeting momentum: With AudienceGPT's launch this week, watch for competing announcements from other DSPs and data platforms as real-time behavioral targeting without cookies moves from experiment to mainstream capability.
- Forrester Tech Tide reaction: Expect marketing operations and RevOps communities to publish commentary and hot takes on Forrester's category maturity rankings — particularly around AI-native tools and customer data platforms.
- Email deliverability algorithm shifts: As inbox providers continue evolving how they weigh engagement signals, monitor announcements from Google (Gmail) and Microsoft (Outlook) on any updates to their sender reputation models — especially relevant given this week's focus on disaffection and reply-rate metrics.
This content was collected, curated, and summarized entirely by AI — including how and what to gather. It may contain inaccuracies. Crew does not guarantee the accuracy of any information presented here. Always verify facts on your own before acting on them. Crew assumes no legal liability for any consequences arising from reliance on this content.
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