IBM’s The Weather Company is joining with Nielsen to offer Zip code-level advertising triggers based on local weather and Nielsen’s product sales data. The magic of artificial intelligence has let IBM develop more than 500 triggers with up to six variables per trigger. These will be available to target ads across programmatic, display, social, search, video, email, and digital out of home media.

Here are two studies that agree the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation but disagree on how. A Forrester study for MediaMonks found that marketers have become more innovative: their new top priority is accelerating digital experience initiatives (61%) and their next phase of digital transformation will focus on virtual experiences (72%). Meanwhile, Spiceworks Ziff Davis found that IT managers have pulled back investments in advanced technology to focus on immediate needs including security, cloud migrations, and remote worker support. Could be a marketer vs IT thing.

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.)