Dentsu Group is expanding the commerce capabilities of its Merkle unit by purchasing customer service and commerce agency LiveArea.  LiveArea was the consulting arm of PFSweb, which will continue to offer fulfillment services.  PFSweb reported the price at $250 million, roughly three times LiveArea revenues of $85 million.

Fast-growing event management platform Hopin is buying Attendify, which provides an “attendee data platform” to support CRM and marketing functions including email campaigns.  It’s (at least) the fifth acquisition Hopin has made this year.

It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data.  Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions.  Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.