Email vendor Campaign Monitor has merged with email vendors Emma and Delivra. Each will be sold separately under the Campaign Monitor umbrella. Campaign Monitor and Emma serve mostly small businesses while Delivra serves more advanced marketers. You may recall that Campaign Monitor purchased the Tagga customer data platform back in March 2017.

I could tell you about Tru Optik’s Cross-Screen Audience Validation (CAV) service, which draws on Tru Optik’s 75 million household database of smart TV viewers to give advertisers detailed information on audience demographics, reach and frequency by audience segment. But I doubt you care. So instead, ponder this: an IBM computer is now competing effectively with human debaters, showcasing skills like marshalling facts and choosing the most effective arguments. In other words: you’ll soon be able to argue with Alexa and lose.

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.