Media buying agency Horizon Media is partnering with TransUnion to identify consumers across channels for ad targeting and analysis. It’s one more example of preparing to execute “people-based” marketing programs after third party cookies are just a delicious memory.

Finally, UK ad trade group ISBA and PwC have conclusively proven that adtech is a hot mess. After two years of work, PwC media experts and data scientists could only map 12% of 267 programmatic million impressions from advertisers to publishers and couldn’t account for 15% of total spend. They did find that publishers receive just half the money paid by advertisers. Brilliantly illustrating the obvious, they conclude “this supply chain complexity seems unlikely to be consistently in the best interests of market participants.”

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).