The folks at agency holding company Publicis Groupe no doubt care about security, but their latest acquisition is ecommerce analytics software company Profitero. It’s unusual for an ad agency to own straight-up commercial software, but Publicis must have decided that Profitero’s predictive analytics for product, content, search, pricing, and other decisions is worth the reported €200 million ($210 million) price.
Security improvements (and possibly tacos) are also on the menu at omnichannel marketing platform ActiveCampaign, which just purchased DMARC Digests, an email authentication and monitoring service. ActiveCampaign also bought transactional email service Postmark. The deals have little in common beyond expanding the scope of ActiveCampaign’s offerings.
For one brief, if delusional, moment, marketers thought adtech had made accurate performance measurement a reality. Loss of third-party cookies and device IDs shattered the illusion. The gold-standard alternative has always been controlled experiments to measure incremental results, but that’s been too hard to execute. Measured just raised $21 million to make it easier. On average, they find 40% of media investments are ineffective.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.