Chat is hot. This study from in-app messaging vendor Apptentive found a 33% increase in interaction rates among its customers in the past year: companies went from interacting with 9% of their customers to 12%, and response rates also inched up from 62% to 65%. Some other interesting stats in the report, but most useful was a link to a SearchMarketingDaily article that reported 70% of chatbot interactions ultimately require human intervention and itself linked to several other studies.

Speaking of inevitable: if consumers are going to be targeted no matter what, they might as well get paid for allowing it, right? That’s more or less the principle behind People.io, which gives people modest rewards in exchange for answering questions about their interests, activities, or habits. The information is used to target advertisements, although personal data is never shared outside of People.io It’s all GDPR complaint. The company just did its first major international deal, making a version of its app available to 44 million customers of Telefónica Germany.

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.