American Express has launched Amex Advance, a service that builds target marketing audiences by projecting the characteristics of Amex card holders onto similar consumers. It works by matching the Amex card holder list against lists owned by publishers, ad networks and marketing audience providers. All data is anonymized before matching and the matching itself is done by Acxiom, acting as a trusted third party. In case it’s not obvious: the point is give marketers alternatives to the data-rich targeting offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other walled gardens.

And since we’re talking about alliances, let’s note that Dun & Bradstreet announced its company data will now be available to Salesforce.com users via a Lightning Data app on the AppExchange. Users get real time data cleansing and enrichment. To put things in perspective, there are five other Lightning Data integrations including DataFox, HGData, Clearbit, Bombora, and MCH healthcare data.

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.