Ok, Dear Reader, I know you’re not always interested in surveys but here are some that are exceptionally deep. First, Evergage dives into personalization and finds that 88% of marketers think their customers expect it but just 31% think marketers get it right. A solid 87% report personalization has generated a measureable lift in results. Good detail here on channels, data sources, obstacles, and such. Best factoid: the proportion thinking personalization should be a high priority has grown from 64% in 2016 to 77% in 2018.

And here’s IDenTV, which uses AI to identify faces, objects, logos, scenes, and activities within videos. It stores them as metadata so the videos can be searched, analyzed and used to train other AIs. You read that right: the machines are making other machines smarter.

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.