Despite all the martech products available today, custom software is alive and well.  About 60% of US and UK marketers told Mailjet they have built their own marketing technology and another 20% have a project under way. Home-grown systems are harder to use but the cost of switching keeps many companies locked in. Click here for a summary and here for tons of interesting detail on pros and cons of each option.

Adtech vendor MediaMath has pledged to deliver a “100 percent accountable and addressable supply chain by the end of 2020”, via a cooperative project called SOURCE. It’s a bit unclear what’s involved (at least to me), but the commitment to “righting the wrongs of a digital advertising industry” that has “gotten lost in fraud, waste, and irrelevance” taps into a mad-as-hell-and-we-won’t-take-it spirit within the advertising world and beyond.

There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.