The News Gods have been mostly on vacation this week, but they did share that casino and events operator Bally’s Corporation is buying Telescope Inc., which builds real-time engagement solutions for live and online events. The deal will bolster Bally’s interactive brands. It’s an example of brands buying technology companies instead of just using their products.
Managers do recognize the problem: 55% of data and analytics pros in this Dremio survey said their company has increased its data investments in the past two years, but just 22% of that group said they had achieved a full return on their investment. Meanwhile, this Harvard Business Review Analytic Service report for Profisee found that 60% of executives believe their company underinvests in data. They see processes including data governance, master data management, and data auditing, as the most important solutions, not data warehouse or cloud technologies.
While brands sometimes buy tech for themselves, most tech acquisitions are still by other tech companies who want to expand their scope or snap up a competitor. Verint, which rather grandiosely calls itself “The Customer Engagement CompanyTM” but basically analyzes phone calls, has expanded the old-fashioned way by purchasing Conversocial, which provides messaging tools for human and bot service agents. Price was $50 million.
Adobe has announced a new solution within its GenStudio suite, GenStudio for Performance Marketing. This self-service application is aimed at accelerating the creation of display and social ads, emails and banners using approved, on-brand content. The solution will leverage Adobe Firefly as well as third-party LLMs.