Switching to ad measurement: NielsenIQ has purchased omnichannel analytics vendor Data Impact and e-commerce purchase panel builder Rakuten Intelligence.  The deals will extend NielsenIQ’s own retail sales data to provide a more complete view ecommerce results. Separately, Accretive Media has launched an automated out-of-home ad measurement product that combines data on screen locations, consumer households, online and offline sales, foot traffic, website visits, and app downloads. Also: LoopMe has introduced PurchaseLoop Measurement, which uses surveys to measure brand lift across all digital channels in real time.

In classic lemonade-from-lemons style, Google is adapting to the loss of cookies by switching Google Ads’ default conversion reporting away from click-based methods to machine learning-based attribution models.  The company swears its technique drives lower cost-per-acquisition, and it probably does.  But it also requires you to trust that they’ll honestly report results since there’s no way to check their work.

IT teams spend lots of time on repetitive requests from business users, finds this TeamDynamix survey.  You might think the implication is IT should let users do more for themselves.  But the main time-wasters are things like password resets, employee on-boarding, and managing credentials, which can’t really be delegated.  And here’s the kicker: IT professionals automate those tasks by building sloppy, insecure, undocumented scripts, just like the non-professionals.   Fun fact: 53% of teams manage 100 or more applications.