Competitive promotion tracker Market Track has acquired InfoScout, which captures sales information by scanning store receipts from a consumer panel. The combined firm will be able to connect marketing programs with sales results. John Wannamaker would be so happy. Market Track itself was purchased in April by Vista Equity Partners, whose other martech holdings include Marketo, Lithium, and Xactly.

I haven’t pestered you recently about GDPR (those new European data privacy rules, now less than a year away).  But this Spiceworks report shows just five percent of U.S. companies have even begun to prepare, so another nudge is in order.  Consider yourself nudged.  Remember that GDPR affects any company holding data on European Union citizens, even if the company is the U.S.

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.