This Ascend2 survey for Oracle has lots of interesting information, but also some puzzles.  For example: CDPs rank first on the list of planned martech investments (37%) but data silos data and poor integration fall last on the list of challenges.  Or consider this:  82% say they want to change some stack components to improve performance while 88% say they already have access to appropriate data for marketing decisions.

Kustomer spoke with CX professionals, who predictably believe that customer service will become more important in the next three years. They sided with IT in citing scattered data as their organizations’ biggest weakness, with insufficiently personalized experience ranked second. But when it came to actual priorities, reducing wait times was number one at 81%, while increased personalization finished fifth at 66%.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.