Here’s another unexpected announcement: mParticle has added a “User Aliasing API” that can automatically merge profiles when an anonymous user is associated with a known user ID. You might have thought they could already do that. The moral is to check such things with any vendor, even the established ones.
Much of the U.S. is baking in a heat wave, so we’ll save energy by making today’s newsletter exceptionally brief. Item 1: outdoor media agency Adquick has launched a cost-per-engagement model for outdoor advertising – something that has traditionally been as unmeasurable as it gets. Advertisers pay for responses to SMS codes shown in the ad.
Barking up the same tree, TV ad buying and measurement vendor VideoAmp has acquired IronGrid Data Services, which provides access to “secure, anonymized, and privacy-complaint” TV viewership data from video program providers and connected TVs. VideoAmp will use this as part of a new data division that aggregates data from set-top boxes and automated content recognition to provide segmentation and viewership data.
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.