MRx News

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.

Next 15 has acquired Technical Associates Group, or TAG. TAG is a strategy, insight, content and PR business focused on the industrial engineering sector. This acquisition is in line with Next 15's stated purpose: to become the world's largest and most respected specialist communications group through building a portfolio of specialized businesses.

Omnicom has rolled out a people-based marketing and insights platform called Omni. Omni is billed as a people-based precision marketing and insights platform, designed to identify and define personalized consumer experiences at scale across creative, media, CRM as well as other Omnicom practice areas.

Accenture, which provides strategy, consulting, and marketing services, acquires Kogentix. Kogentix is an applied intelligence data engineering company specializing in AI and big data. Accenture will now be able to help clients run legacy analytics on open source technologies.

Reuter Intelligence, which specializes in serving Chinese luxury brands, has launched an in-house research and insight firm. The goal is to provide these brands with customized research to help them better understand the Chinese luxury market.

The 2018 Nonprofit Marketing Conference hosted by the AMA is now underway. Covering topics from branding and social media to empowering volunteers, the conference focuses on how to maximize marketing budgets. Speakers include Michelle Hurtado, head of ad grants at Google, Aria Finger, CEO of dosomething, and Brigid Bonner, CEO of CaringBridge, among others.