Media buying agency Horizon Media is partnering with TransUnion to identify consumers across channels for ad targeting and analysis. It’s one more example of preparing to execute “people-based” marketing programs after third party cookies are just a delicious memory.

Finally, UK ad trade group ISBA and PwC have conclusively proven that adtech is a hot mess. After two years of work, PwC media experts and data scientists could only map 12% of 267 programmatic million impressions from advertisers to publishers and couldn’t account for 15% of total spend. They did find that publishers receive just half the money paid by advertisers. Brilliantly illustrating the obvious, they conclude “this supply chain complexity seems unlikely to be consistently in the best interests of market participants.”

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.