Email vendor Campaign Monitor has merged with email vendors Emma and Delivra. Each will be sold separately under the Campaign Monitor umbrella. Campaign Monitor and Emma serve mostly small businesses while Delivra serves more advanced marketers. You may recall that Campaign Monitor purchased the Tagga customer data platform back in March 2017.

I could tell you about Tru Optik’s Cross-Screen Audience Validation (CAV) service, which draws on Tru Optik’s 75 million household database of smart TV viewers to give advertisers detailed information on audience demographics, reach and frequency by audience segment. But I doubt you care. So instead, ponder this: an IBM computer is now competing effectively with human debaters, showcasing skills like marshalling facts and choosing the most effective arguments. In other words: you’ll soon be able to argue with Alexa and lose.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)