Lots of personalization industry news today, Dear Reader. Retail-oriented analytical CDP Manthan and recommendation engine RichRelevance have announced a “path to consolidating” pending regulatory approvals. The firms will start joint sales and marketing right away. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because analytical CDP Amperity bought recommendation engine Custora just yesterday.

You’ve surely heard already that Google’s parent company Alphabet is buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, and don’t need me to point out that this is about collecting data, not selling wearable devices. So let’s instead report that panel-based customer research company UserTesting has acquired fabulously-named Truthlab, which uses AI to find highlights in video feeds. As with Fitbit, the goal is to extract useful information from people’s behaviors. It’s Zuboffian!

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.