Measurement Stories You Missed from January 2023

The year started with an exciting string of acquisitions across the industry. Freshly-launched Penta acquired a consultancy, Truescope acquired Universal, while Babel Street and Sprout Social invested in NLA and AI providers to strengthen their respective products. (It’s a year that is likely to be defined by AI, and I wonder how many AI acquisitions we will see.) Meanwhile Meltwater is to go private, and Edelman paints a sorrowful trust picture.

Meltwater set to go private, once again

Back in December 2020, Meltwater listed itself on Norway’s Euronext Growth Oslo exchange at NOK 43.50 per share. A couple of years later, and Meltwater’s board has approved a 100% buyout from a newly formed company M.W. Investment BV. The new entity is funded by Altor, an existing investor in Meltwater, and Marlin Equity, which also owns Talkwalker. The deal is worth NOK 18 per share, about NOK 5.8 billion in total. The offer is expected to launch at the end of Q1.

Penta acquires Irish consultancy

Penta has acquired the consultancy Hume Brophy, in its first acquisition since it launched in September of last year. Hume Brophy’s chief executive, Conall McDevitt, will become a senior partner and managing partner of Europe and Asia at Penta. The deal brings to Penta about 100 team members working across sectors including energy, transportation and mobility, agribusiness, and financial services.

Truescope picks up Universal

Australia’s Truescope has acquired Universal Information Services (UIS) in the US. The merger of the UIS brand and business to Truescope will take place take place over the next few months and migration of UIS clients to Truescape is underway. Todd Murphy, Universal’s CEO, will take over as Truescope president, North America. Launched in 2020, Truescope is currently active in New Zealand, Singapore and the USA. Truescope’s founder and CEO, John Croll, said the acquisition was a significant move to accelerate growth in the US market.

Babel Street acquires text analysis firm

Babel Street, the Virginia-based open source intelligence provider, has acquired the text analytics platform Rosette, a solution provided by BasisTech. Rosette applies machine learning and deep neural nets to help companies identify and understand relationships amongst people, locations, organizations, and events in multilingual text. Babel Street intends to leverage Rosette’s deep AI and machine-learning-driven natural language processing (NLP) technology to help improve safety and security for their customers.

Sprout Social acquires NLP provider

Sticking with the theme, Sprout Social has acquired Repustate, a sentiment analysis and natural language processing company. Repustate reads and analyzes text and video content natively, transforming data through natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning into business intelligence. Sprout Social intends to leverage the technology to increase the power, breadth and automation of social listening, messaging and customer care capabilities with added sentiment analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial-intelligence (AI).

Facebook Sues Voyager Labs

Meta has filed a lawsuit against the social media surveillance provider, Voyager Labs. Meta accuses Voyager of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ profiles. It says the company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its Surveillance Software, and that the company has also scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Meta has asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram.

Edelman reports trust in the employer

Now surveying some 32,000 respondents across 28 countries, Edelman’s Trust Barometer has become the annual go-to read on the state of trust in institutions. It seems that every year the story becomes a little bleaker. On a positive note, at 61%, business is the most trusted institution, ahead of NGOs at 59%, government at 52% and media at only 50%. Seventy-seven percent of respondents, however, trust “My Employer”, highlighting the importance of internal comms. On the negative side, trust in journalists is particularly poor (46%), which should worry any media relations pro. The report and the company that produces it has its critics, but it is always a fascinating read.

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PR Measurement Stories You Missed in January