Vendor alliances are rarely worth mentioning but we’ll make an exception for news that visual recognition expert Clarifai is working with personalization vendor RichRelevance to create a suite of visually-based personalization tools. Use of visual inputs in marketing qualifies as an Important Trend.

If companies can’t run their systems or keep their data safe, getting consent to use customer data almost seems irrelevant.

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.