Week 43, 2026
Coverage window 16 – 22 October 2026.
For the interpretation of this week, and what a pending change of ownership means for architecture decisions made in the meantime, see the companion essay: Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 25, Week 43. This page is the record; the essay is the read.
This week’s record
Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value, with closing expected in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028 subject to Braze shareholder approval and regulatory approvals.
- Braze published its 15 October release after the previous edition was compiled: Decisioning Studio Go, Message Prioritization and real-time Content Cards reached general availability, Agentic Standards entered beta, and four SDK major versions carry breaking changes.
- Bloomreach made Loomi Connect generally available, exposing more than 180 tools to MCP-compatible agents alongside connectors, webhooks and APIs.
- Adobe Marketo Engage published its November release notes for 6 November, including Callable Agents as a smart campaign flow step; the October release no longer appears on the release schedule.
- Iterable’s October release added segmentation guardrails, scheduled lists, a journey Loop tile, twelve Experiments API endpoints and a Salesforce integration that sends opt-in and opt-out changes back to Contact and Lead records.
- Insider documented hashed email identifiers, Field Encryption and Event Enrichment (both early access), and wait elements for transactional journeys; Adobe Experience Platform published its October pre-release notes, with “When to activate” moving to general availability.
What changed this week
| Platform | What changed | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe Experience PlatformPre-release (page updated Oct 21)Product release / destinations | October pre-release notes: When to activate generally available, to “control which profile changes trigger exports” to streaming destinations by attribute, segmentation and identity changes, all three on by default; 6sense Segments destination for Real-Time CDP B2B Edition; Coworker reachable from Microsoft 365 Copilot and ChatGPT; SQL audiences created through Coworker (Data Distiller entitlement, compute consumed after confirmation); manual deletion from Data Landing Zone; Real-Time Customer Profile support for unstructured data; Delta Sharing source beta concluded 1 August, GA planned for 2027 | Pre-release notes |
| Adobe Journey OptimizerReleased (Oct 20)Agentic AI / governance | Journey Hygiene Analysis skill in CX Enterprise Coworker, which “scans journeys for configuration hygiene issues and suggests fixes in chat”: missing or generic names, stale draft and live journeys, oversized journeys, long-existing closed journeys, similar action or event names. New in Coming soon: AEM Managed Services content fragments supported in Decisioning | Release notes |
| Adobe Marketo EngageComing soon (Nov 6)Product release / agentic AI | November ‘26 release notes, rollout from 6 November: Callable Agents that “run as a flow step in your smart campaigns and act on a lead record based on instructions you write in plain language”, writing results back to lead fields; a Plan Campaigns skill that turns a campaign brief into a program setup document; Clone to This Program/Folder; a notification when native CRM sync is enabled or disabled. Grab Images from Web “will be deprecated as of the November release”; API names for custom activity attributes restricted to alphanumerics and underscores. The release schedule now lists November ‘26 on 6 November and no October release | Release notes · Release schedule |
| BloomreachGA (Oct 21)MCP / agentic AI | Loomi Connect generally available: “More than 180 tools give compatible AI agents access to Bloomreach’s analytics, search, and marketing capabilities”; agents can “analyze performance, build segments, launch campaigns, and take other approved actions”; delivered through connectors, webhooks, APIs and MCP; the vendor reports more than 200 agents built and more than 50,000 weekly tool invocations. Release 1.320 rollout window closed 19 October | Bloomreach |
| BrazeReleased (Oct 15)Product release | 15 October release: BrazeAI Decisioning Studio Go (an agent that picks subject line, send time and image per recipient for recurring email, with a random control group), Message Prioritization (categories and ranked rules decide which competing message sends under frequency caps, with retry windows), real-time Content Cards (requires Swift 18.0.0, Android 43.1.1 or Web 6.12.0), Messaging Observability tracing, Teams support for Catalogs, Intelligent IP warming, Industry Benchmarks dashboard, Email NPS block, apex proxying for new link-shortening domains, IP-based bot click filtering for SMS and RCS all generally available; Agentic Standards in beta; Web Targeting for Banners in early access; Google DV360 Audience Sync in beta | What’s new in Braze |
| BrazeReleased, breaking (Oct 15)SDK release | SDK breaking updates: Swift SDK 19.0.0 raises the minimum to iOS 15.0 and tvOS 15.0 and removes DisplayChoice.later; Android SDK 44.0.0 and Swift 19.0.0 merge Banner refreshes into the existing cache; Web SDK 7.0.0 refreshes only requested placements and stops returning expired Banners; Flutter SDK 23.0.0 requires Flutter 3.44.0 and Dart 3.12.0. New subscribe-to-events methods deprecate the subscribeTo…Updates methods | What’s new in Braze |
| InsiderDocumented (Oct 19)Identity | Hashed Email Identifiers: a plain email address and its SHA-256 and MD5 hashes are treated as the same person, so data that arrives with only a hash updates the right profile | Hashed Email Identifiers |
| InsiderEarly access / documented (Oct 16 – 22)Data / journeys | Field Encryption Key (identifiers encrypted with the customer’s own AES, DES or 3DES key are decrypted and matched on ingestion) and Event Enrichment (missing event parameters filled from the product catalog by product ID), both early access; wait elements for Transactional Journeys (fixed or API-supplied durations, 30-day limit); Design Agent for pop-ups, inline blocks and games; Call an API templates in Architect; Web Messenger channel and Knowledge Base for AI Agents | Field Encryption Key · Event Enrichment · Wait elements · Design Agent |
| InsiderReleased (Oct 15 – 16)SDK release | Array of Objects values in custom user attributes and event parameters: Android SDK 17.3.2 and iOS SDK 16.3.0 (Oct 15), React Native 9.1.0 and Flutter 5.4.0 bridges (Oct 16) | Android · iOS · React Native · Flutter |
| IterableReleased (Oct 20)Product release | October monthly release: segmentation guardrails (limits on query patterns known to cause reliability issues, regex searches restricted to safe fields, org- and project-level settings); scheduled lists from any eligible query; journey Loop tile; 12 Experiments API endpoints; integrations with Recharge, Stripe, TikTok Ads, and Salesforce data out, “syncing email opt-in and opt-out updates from Iterable back to Salesforce Contact and Lead records”. The open-rate recalculation for consent-based tracking is still described as coming | 2026 Release Notes |
| Klaviyo (watchlist)Shipped (Oct 16 – 20)Product release | Build, test and operate Customer Agent inside Composer; Klaviyo in Japanese (Oct 16); onsite previews for forms (Oct 19); signatures for outbound Helpdesk replies (Oct 20) | What’s New |
| Marketing Cloud NextUpdated (week of Oct 19)Product release | Approved attachments on email templates: the release note now states “Feature available in November 2026”; recommenders release note retitled | Winter ‘27 Marketing release notes |
| OpenAI (ChatGPT Ads)Launched (Oct 21)Advertising / market signal | ChatGPT Ads expanded to 26 more countries, 89 in total, with access through technology partners or self-service Ads Manager; the vendor reports more than 100,000 advertisers | OpenAI |
| RegulatorsGuidance (Oct 16) · Fine (decision Oct 2)Regulation | CNIL guidance on reconstructing professional email addresses from data found online for B2B prospecting: legitimate interest only under conditions, with limited retention among suggested safeguards (Oct 16). Norwegian Data Protection Authority fined Xandr (part of Microsoft) EUR 8.6 million over real-time bidding involving Grindr users’ data; final decision 2 October, published by the EDPB on 16 October | CNIL · EDPB |
| SalesforceRetirement scheduled (Oct 20)API / integration | October retirement newsletter lists SOAP API login() retiring in Summer ‘27 (June 2027) and Platform API versions 31.0 to 40.0 in Summer ‘28 (June 2028), both also on the Active Product & Feature Retirements page | Active retirements |
| Salesforce / BrazeAnnounced (pending close, Oct 20)M&A | Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value, $47.50 in cash per Braze Class A share. Salesforce expects Braze to “complement all four layers” of its architecture and to strengthen Marketing Cloud’s cross-channel personalization; Braze’s CEO states “we’ll continue building as Braze”. Close expected in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028, subject to Braze shareholder approval and regulatory approvals | Salesforce · Braze investor news · Braze Form 8-K |
| TealiumShipped (Oct 16 – 21)SDK / consent | Tealium Prism, a next-generation mobile SDK platform for Android and iOS that does not rely on a WebView (Oct 16); server-side profile validations become non-blocking warnings (Oct 20); Didomi v2 consent integration, and blocked-tag reporting now counts only tags prevented by consent (Oct 21) | Release notes feed |
| Treasure AIReleased / early access (Oct 21 – 22)MCP / advertising | Agent Channels in AI Studio: SDK Apps (Oct 21) and MCP Endpoints that publish a work folder as a remote MCP server with a connection token (Oct 22); OpenAI Ads Conversion API Export connector, early access, with SHA-256 hashing of identifiers (Oct 21) | October 2026 |
| TwilioGA (Oct 16)Access / security | Unified Login for SendGrid marketplace customers: an individual Twilio login per user instead of a shared admin, rolling out over the following weeks | Twilio changelog |
Late captures in this edition. Braze’s 15 October release (above) was published after the previous edition was compiled; it is recorded here in full because it sits on the closing day of that window. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement added release notes in the weeks of 11 and 13 October that the previous edition recorded as absent: Prepare for the WhatsApp Account Model Update, Prepare for WhatsApp Service and Utility Message Pricing Changes, and a note on TLS 1.3 under Other Changes (MCE release notes). Marketing Cloud Next in the week of 12 October added the same WhatsApp account model note and removed four Landing Pages and Forms release notes (site configuration with Marketing Sites, Handlebars and AMPscript personalisation, custom HTML, more data sources) because “these features aren’t quite ready yet”. Adobe Journey Optimizer dated a Journey execution timeline skill for Read Audience journeys 1 October. Insider’s Android 17.3.0 and iOS 16.2.0 (2 October) preceded the Array of Objects releases above.
No changes this week (scanned, nothing net-new)
Scanned for the 16 – 22 October window with no net-new release:
- 6sense: release notes newest 6 October.
- Adobe Campaign: Client Console 8.9.4 (15 October) and Web UI September ‘26 release (22 September) still newest.
- Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B: release 2026.9 still newest; page restamped 19 October.
- Adobe Marketo Engage MCP Server pages: unchanged since 9 and 7 October.
- HubSpot: community board carried a set of practical guides (21 October), not a product release; the developer changelog announced the end of Node.js 20 support in the developer CLI (19 October).
- Insider newsroom: newest item 29 September.
- MoEngage, Phave, Zeotap: no new release notes.
- Salesforce Account Engagement: no change in its Winter ‘27 release note log since the week of 14 September.
- Garante, CNIL enforcement, FTC: nothing on marketing technology beyond the items above; the Garante’s 20 October note on telemarketing reports is statistical.
Scanned but unresolved, reported as source states rather than vendor silence:
- Marketing Cloud Engagement and Next WhatsApp note bodies: titles recorded from the monthly change logs; bodies not opened this run.
- Databricks CustomerLake beta update and Adobe and NVIDIA on Brand Concierge: surfaced by an aggregator; not traced to the vendor page this run, so not recorded. The aggregator dated the Adobe item 20 October; Adobe’s own release appears to be dated 15 October.
Watching next (Week 44)
- Braze: next release in the four-week cadence; any customer or partner guidance on the pending acquisition.
- Marketo November release on 6 November and Grab Images from Web leaving.
- Garante tracking-pixel term on 29 October; Iterable’s open-rate recalculation.
- AJO Audience Composition stop at the end of October; AEP October release notes moving from pre-release.
- Salesforce refresh-token idle limit in production on 4 November.
How this is compiled. Each edition is assembled from official vendor release notes, changelogs and newsrooms, plus regulator publications. An AI assistant does the first-pass scan, reading release notes in a browser or through vendor-published Markdown and feed routes, and I review and edit before publishing. Items are checked against the primary source; anything I could not confirm is marked inline. Dates and status reflect what was published as of the current-as-of date and can change.
Corrections and method notes. Spot an error? Tell me and I will fix it in the next edition. The previous edition expected Agentic Standards at Braze to reach general availability; the 15 October release lists it as beta. It also recorded no change in Marketing Cloud Engagement’s release note log; the WhatsApp and TLS notes above were added in the weeks of 11 and 13 October. The previous edition listed Marketo’s October release for 23 October; the schedule no longer lists an October release. The EDPB listed the Norwegian Xandr fine on 16 October; the issuing authority’s final decision is dated 2 October, and that is the date recorded here.
MarTech Watch is compiled and edited by Andrea Veggiani, Head of Cross-Channel Marketing & MarTech Solutions at BitBang.