Finally, ad blocking recovery vendor Blockthrough has purchased adblocking analytics vendor Pagefair. Blockthrough serves a “safe, light, and un-intrusive ad experience” to adblock users who have opted into “Acceptable Ads”, recovering about 70% of the revenue that would otherwise be lost. This is at least vaguely interesting, right Dear Reader? Hello?
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the official start of the holiday shopping season. So let’s look at shopping behavior. We’ll start with a survey from real estate firm JLL Retail, which finds that just 31% of consumers expect to do most of their shopping in physical stores, although another 15% will buy online and pick up at a retailer. Just over half will make at least one purchase from their phone, up from 22% last year.
Ad optimization vendor Thunder Experience Cloud conducted a much more elaborate research project, analyzing billions of ad impressions to compare cookie- and device-based identification with people-based identification from LiveRamp. They found that cookie- and device-based methods report twice as many unique individuals as people-based methods. In other words, people-based measurement shows that the ads reached half as many different people and each person received twice as many impressions as cookie- and device-based measurement reported. The gap grew larger as campaigns got bigger.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)