Commerce Signals builds ad audiences based on anonymized credit and debit card data.  But targeting households based on their actual purchases would be a privacy violation, so they use the purchases to find a sample of households in a target group, build a look-alike model of that sample using less sensitive data, and sell the look-alike audience.  They just made the audiences available in the LiveRamp data marketplace.

Google’s long-awaited plan to block third party cookies might be derailed by the UK’s competition authority.  The possible action reflects industry concerns that the loss of third-party cookies would give Google an advantage, since it can collect much data directly.  Expect more conflict between competition and privacy as both issues are taken more seriously.

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.