Now for some good news: integration of marketing stacks has improved sharply over the past two years, according to Walker Sands’ State of Marketing Technology 2019 report. Compared with the 2017 study, companies with an integrated best of breed stack rose from 27% to 34% and those using a single vendor suite rose from 21% to 27%. Limited piecemeal and fragmented best of breed stacks fell from 42% to 17%. Just 7% reported they have no marketing technology, compared with 17% in the earlier report.

Finally, identity verification vendor Onfido has raised $50 million in new funding from Salesforce Ventures among others. Total raise is now $100 million. Onfido verifies consumer identities remotely by comparing a video selfie against a photo of a government identity document. It uses AI to ensure the document is authentic and that the person in the selfie matches the photo ID.

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.