It’s Friday, so let’s just sneak in some bad news while you’re not paying much attention. We’ll start with a study from location intelligence company Location Sciences, which found that up to 65% of location-based ad spend is mistargeted. More precisely, 29% of the ads are delivered outside the target area while 36% rely on IP address, which is not accurate. Oh, and 36% of top GPS-enabled apps display location fraud.

Retailers may be realizing that personalization isn’t as powerful as conventional wisdom suggests. OneMarket found the most common use for customer identity systems is to verify eligibility for targeted discounts, while personalized product recommendations ranked last. A surprisingly high 29% said they could tie ad impressions to subsequent behavior in physical, Web, and mobile apps. Much more here on the topic.

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.)