Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.

One of this year’s most important meta-stories has been regulators’ increasingly effective pushback against seemingly unstoppable tech giants.  We’ve had three examples in the past week, starting with Amazon’s agreement to reduce the advantages it gives to its own products and stop helping itself with data it collects about sales by independent merchants.  Both changes are in response to European Union anti-trust activity and presumably apply only within Europe.

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.