Some say data is the new oil, or maybe the new oil paint. Personally, I think of it as the new bacon. Whatever you call it, the folks at S&P Global think it’s worth lots: so much that they’re merging with data collector IHS Markit in an all-stock transaction valued at $44 billion. Mmmm…data.
Here’s a little stocking stuffer: Admetrics has just launched a freemium version of its Quantify automated campaign experimentation engine. Like its professional big brother, the system combines multivariate testing with Bayesian statistics and machine learning to deliver results more quickly and with less data than traditional A/B tests. And it can automatically introduce new variations as these become available, enabling continuous improvement.
It took just one day after our privacy newsletter called out Microsoft’s Productivity Score as a surveillance nightmare for Microsoft to hide individual information. Okay, lots of other people raised the same issue. Regardless, it shows increasing awareness of workplace privacy issues, especially during the pandemic.
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.)