Retail marketing platform (and CDP) Ometria has raised a $40 million Series C, bringing total funding to $72 million.  Ometria assembles customer data and then uses artificial intelligence to suggest customer segments, identify campaign opportunities, and predict results.  Marketers still design their campaigns and messages, which can be delivered across email, mobile, websites, social, direct mail, and “more”.

Here’s a cheerful McKinsey report that finds 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% are frustrated when they don’t happen.  On the other hand, Digital Commerce 360 found that more shopper wanted the ability to opt out of personalization (52%) than wanted personalized product recommendations (32%) or web pages and search results (11%).

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.