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.

Like the determined optimist who tells his boss the factory is on fire by reporting they’ll soon be able to update their equipment, let’s find some silver linings in a batch of gloomy surveys today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with this Fivetran report, which finds that 85% of data leaders say their company has lost money by basing decisions on bad data, and 66% believe their C-suite can’t tell when that happens.  The bright side is there’s lots of room for improvement.