Data quality and identity tool vendor Melissa has announced a “comprehensive customer data management platform” that combines Melissa’s data cleaning and enrichment with Pentaho data extraction, transformation, and loading. The combined solution, called Contact Zone, includes a drag-and-drop interface for building process flows and hundreds of integrated connectors to common source systems. It’s probably too technical to consider a CDP but it’s certainly something a company’s IT department could use to build their own unified customer database.

Alphonso also watches the OTT watchers, in its case through content recognition software embedded in more than 30 million smart TVs, gaming consoles, mobile apps, and other devices.

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.