Radius Global merges with Illumination Research. Illumination, founded by former Procter & Gamble employees, focuses on qualitative research. Radius offers custom research programs to businesses across branding, segmentation and customer satisfaction. Chip Lester of Radius noted that the companies are well-matched in capabilities, talent, and culture.
Ipsos revealed research that shows (unsurprisingly) emotional engagement in advertising increases dramatically when your team wins. 30 England fans were invited to watch ads before and after England's win over Columbia in the World Cup. Ipsos suggests that brands take advantage of the high emotional wave around major sporting events.
Data collection specialist Viga (which also happens to be owned by Next 15) has bought Thinqoline. Thinqoline offers consulting through customer, employee and market insight programs. This on the heels of Next 15's acquisition yesterday of Technical Associates Group.
Ofcom executive, Sharon White, calls for regulation of news published by social media sites. In her New York Times article, she noted that nearly 40% of people consider social media a reliable source for news. Her full article is linked in the show notes.
Kairos, a startup tech company out of Florida that works in facial recognition, has bought EmotionReader. As its name suggests, EmotionReader analyzes facial expressions of people captured in video. The goal of the acquisition is to make face recognition more accurate.
Openbook, a new social media network, promises to remain tracking and ad free. It will be an open source platform, allowing anyone from the public to examine its code. A secondary goal of Openbook is to be less addictive than Facebook. Openbook has launched a kickstarter campaign that will also be linked in the show notes. Forrester Research ranks somewhat favorable in a media sentiment score according to Accern. However, it appears that this will not meaningfully affect their their share price in either direction.
