Martech’s share of total marketing budgets fell from 29% to 26% in Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey. Gartner doubts this signals a long-term decline but does note that CMO’s struggle to manage martech. They recommend hiring “martech generalists” to help meet changing demands and creating a plan to address skills gaps.

Start-up Osano is tackling a different privacy challenge: helping consumers and businesses know which companies have good privacy practices. They’ve measured practices of more than 7,000 companies and share the results with businesses and consumers. They also offer a consent management tool. Osano was founded in 2018 and has $3 mlilion in seed funding.

With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).