The venerable Data & Marketing Association (DMA) has been purchased by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Founded in 1917 as the Direct Mail Marketing Association, the DMA has struggled to adopt to the digital world. Its combination with ANA (itself founded in 1910) nicely symbolizes the merger of mainstream advertising and direct marketing techniques.

One GDPR-induced crisis is resolved: Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, is back at work despite his scandalous behavior at our GDPR Day party last week. He offers this study from Performics, Microsoft, and Northwestern University, proving that search queries with terms like “shop” indicate that someone is interested in buying things. You read it here first.

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.