We have no real news today so let’s just amuse ourselves with tech. We’ll start with a “second-generation support chatbot” from Intercom, which answers questions as soon as users start typing. You might find that rude but the vendor says it shows the system truly understands customers’ problems. Feel better?

No one worries more about the loss of cookies than DMP vendors, whose business was built on them. Piano, which sells a DMP along with other audience management technologies, is trying to combine its first-party DMP with “zero party data”, the industry term for information that consumers provide voluntarily. The resulting platform, Piano Zero, offers features to collect that data and use it for segmentation and ad targeting.

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.