Sorry about yesterday’s newsletter. We don’t know who gave Jamie the password. Back to real news. Here’s a $16.5 million Series A funding from Nift, which helps local businesses help each other by providing customers of one business with gift cards for another near-by business. If you squint hard enough, you can see this as part of the trend towards rewarding customers directly for use of their data.

Worried you won’t be able to target individuals based on their data? Relax; that future isn’t here yet and, in fact, the options are growing. TiVo, whose cute little boxes quietly track TV viewing in more than 2 million households, just announced it will share the information with Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, allowing advertisers to build custom segments based on TV viewing habits and even to retarget TV ads at specific households.

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.