Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.

More bad news: GlobalWebIndex found personalized Web site recommendations ranked a dismal 17th on the list of product discovery sources. Ray of hope: they were ahead of ads in movie theaters. Most cited sources were search engines, TV, and word of mouth.

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).