Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has been integrated with Swrve, a digital customer interaction engine. Lots of jargon in that sentence. In plainer English: Segment will make data from all sources available to Swrve, which will use it in marketing campaigns (mostly mobile, which is Swrve’s strength). Does that help?

Finally, we have views on “big data” from senior data and analytics executives polled by NewVantage Partners. Their top objective for big data and AI investments was analytics – no surprise given the audience – although customer experience did rank second, ahead of lower costs, innovation, and speed to market. More important: by far the biggest challenges to being data-driven were people (49%) and process (32%). Just 19% cited technology. Most surveys give a similar answer but it’s still easy to forget.

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.