Social customer care vendor Lithium has merged with social marketing platform Spredfast. The products will be merged into a single platform, according to their announcement. Lithium is owned by Vista Equity Partners, which also owns Marketo and Cvent. Spredfast had accrued $138 million in funding per Crunchbase and 582 employees on LinkedIn; the same sources show $202 million funding and 634 employees for Lithium.

CMOs are also looking to a future where they get more data directly from their customers, according to the Duke Fuqua CMO Survey. Seventy percent expected to use more online customer data in the next two years compared with just 30% expecting to use more third party data. If you’re never seen this report, take a peek: it’s a 73-page trove of data on many topics. And if you want more on the future of third party data, check out this recent post on Customer Experience Matrix.

In partnership with attention metrics provider Adelaide, The Trade Desk is now offering high attention inventory to advertisers. Attention — often based on reactions of opt-in panels to ads — is now competing with viewability as a valued attribute, and is being used to complement contextual metrics. Attention has been used in the past to test ads once they have been published; now it’s entering the pre-bid space.