TheChek News Flow

Interpublic Group Buys Retail Analytics Company in Deal Valued at Nearly $100 Million

Intelligence Node expands the ad holding company’s commerce and retail media offerings

Advertising holding company Interpublic Group has acquired Intelligence Node, a Mumbai-based retail analytics firm that helps brands better compete for online sales.

The deal was valued at nearly $100 million including integration costs, according to people familiar with the matter.

Intelligence Node, which was founded in 2012 and employs more than 120 people, works with both brands and retailers. It aims to help those companies understand shopper trends and drive sales by providing them with data to inform their decisions in areas including product development, marketing and sales.

Nearly real-time data about pricing, promotions and availability is important for marketers that want to compete online. If a brand sees a certain competitor’s product is out of stock on a given site, for example, it might make certain strategic moves to capitalize off that.

“If your competitor is currently not there, we want to be spending maybe three times what we would normally spend, or maybe we want to be adjusting the price based on the fact that the competition is low,” said Jarrod Martin, chief executive of Kinesso, the marketing intelligence and engineering arm of IPG, as well as the CEO of IPG’s Acxiom data unit.

Ad holding companies have been amping up their commerce offerings as brands increasingly seek more direct relationships with consumers as well as tools to succeed in digital and physical stores. E-commerce and retail media, in which businesses such as grocery and big-box chains offer advertisers ways to reach consumers using customer data, have both seen substantial growth in recent years.

IPG’s competitors have made major plays in the commerce space. Omnicom Group last year said it would buy digital commerce company Flywheel Digital for a net cash purchase price of about $835 million, while Publicis Groupe bought Mars United Commerce, a commerce marketing agency, in a deal valuing Mars at around $600 million.

IPG, which owns agency groups such as McCann Worldgroup and IPG Mediabrands, already has strong consumer data through its Acxiom unit, according to Martin. IPG acquired that business for $2.3 billion in 2018.

“But what we’ve been missing is product and commerce data at scale that we can use to augment that consumer data,” Martin said.

IPG has been working to improve its overall performance, which has suffered the past year from a pullback in spending from tech clients, client losses and underperformance from its tech agencies. The company said during its October earnings call that it hoped mergers and acquisitions in the commerce space would help drive growth, among other changes and initiatives.

“We see strategic opportunity in specialized data assets in commerce and retail media—also, companies with retail media technology platforms and reach, given that’s a sector that’s growing quickly and should continue to thrive,” IPG Chief Executive Philippe Krakowsky said on the call.

Azoria Partners will hold event at Donald Trump’s Florida resort on Thursday

A new fund aiming to punish “woke” companies will make Starbucks its first target, as politically motivated investors move to capitalise on Donald Trump’s election.

The actively managed fund, which Azoria Partners expects to launch early next year, will exclude S&P 500 companies that incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion considerations into their hiring processes.

The fund will unveil its Starbucks plan on Thursday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to prepared remarks seen by the Financial Times.

The event will be attended by Cathie Wood and Kevin Roberts, the ideologue behind the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s government, according to an invitation seen by the FT. Wood and Roberts did not respond to requests for comment.

“Americans, whether they voted for president Trump or not, do not want to invest in companies running woke science experiments,” said James Fishback, one of Azoria’s founders, in an interview, referring to hiring practices that factor in diversity. “We are representing shareholders here, and human capital hiring quotas — that hurts all shareholders.”

The coffee chain, with a market capitalisation of about $110bn, denied in a statement to the Financial Times that it had “targets or quotas at any stage of the hiring process”. The chain said that policies cited by Azoria — which included reaching racial and ethnic diversity of at least 30 per cent among corporate employees — recently expired and were not reinstated.

The new fund is the latest attempt by Trump-supporting investors to push back against DEI and environmental, social and governance initiatives by big US companies — and to profit from the coming change in government in Washington.

Shares in Starbucks, which has around 40,000 coffee shops globally, have lagged behind the broader market this year but have risen since August on hopes that newly appointed chief executive Brian Niccol would turn its struggling business around.

The new “anti-woke” fund, created by Fishback and his Azoria co-founder Asaf Abramovich, has a list of about three dozen other companies it will exclude from the roster, unless they scrap their DEI policies.

Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think-tank, and Wood, founder of Ark Investment Management, are both scheduled to address the event at Trump’s resort on Thursday.

Fishback’s fund does not manage any money yet, meaning the Starbucks campaign lacks the financial heft to influence the retailer’s decisions. Powerful activist fund Elliott Management recently built a large stake in the chain, helping to spur replacement of its CEO earlier this year.

Unlike an activist hedge fund, which buys stakes in companies to agitate for change, Azoria will push its agenda by excluding companies from their index and publicly claim DEI policies are hurting their stock price.

The strategy borrows from so-called environmental, social and governance funds, which excluded investments in polluting industries and were attacked by many conservatives.

Azoria’s new ETF is set to launch early next year under the ticker SPXM, which stands for S&P Meritocracy. In remarks at the Mar-a-Lago event, Fishback will claim the stocks of S&P 500 companies that factor diversity into hiring have underperformed their rivals.

Some research has contradicted that, including a McKinsey report last year that found companies in the top quartile of racial diversity were 39 per cent more likely to perform better than those in the bottom quartile.

Fishback, who previously worked at hedge fund Greenlight Capital and is mired in a legal dispute with its founder David Einhorn, is among Wall Street investors aiming to cash in on a conservative shift as Trump returns to the White House.

Other politically driven investors have punched far above their weight. The activist investor Engine No. 1 secured three board seats in 2021 at ExxonMobil by mounting a campaign against the oil major while only overseeing $240mn worth of assets.

Fishback argued hiring on ethnic and racial diversity grounds was a political act that would hurt shareholders.

He said: “Cut that crap out. Hire the best and brightest. Don’t apologise for it, make money, give it to shareholders, and do the right thing.”

Venture capitalist has role in interviewing and identifying candidates for new Department for Government Efficiency

Marc Andreessen, one of the world’s most powerful venture capitalists, is playing a central role in recruiting for Elon Musk’s US government cost-cutting unit, in a sign of the deepening ties between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump’s incoming administration. 

The billionaire co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz is helping interview and identify candidates for the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge), a new advisory body created by the president-elect and co-chaired by Musk, according to two people with knowledge of the talent search.

While having no formal role at Doge, Andreessen is suggesting potential candidates and introducing his own network as the department begins to hire staff, one of the people said. 

Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Andreessen, who co-founded early web browser Netscape, already has close ties to the Tesla chief executive, having invested hundreds of millions of dollars in his start-ups including xAI and SpaceX, while also backing Musk’s $44bn takeover of X. 

Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has promised to cut $2tn from the US budget together with Doge co-head Vivek Ramaswamy, a former rival for the Republican nomination for president.

In mid-November, the Doge account on X encouraged any potential candidates to send in their CVs, posting: “We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” 

Andreessen is focused on bringing in higher-level candidates rather than assessing the pile of résumés sent in by hopefuls, one person said. 

Andreessen and his co-founder Ben Horowitz came out in support of Trump in July, a move that shocked Silicon Valley and reversed years of support for Democratic candidates. 

Horowitz later pledged support to Trump’s rival Kamala Harris, but Andreessen doubled down on his backing of the president-elect and has emerged as an important influence. “He is spending a lot of time over at Mar-a-Lago,” said a person with knowledge of the matter in a reference to Trump’s Florida estate.

In X posts and interviews, Andreessen has railed against some artificial intelligence companies for being too “woke”, and accused social media groups such as Google’s YouTube of “censoring” American voices in the past. These attacks echo similar refrains from Musk over recent months. 

However, Andreessen also sits on the board of Meta, whose chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been repeatedly criticised by Trump for allegedly blocking conservative comments on its platforms.

Trump already appears to have been influenced by Andreessen. In a post on his social media network Truth Social on Wednesday, in which he announced the nomination of Gail Slater to lead the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, Trump wrote: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” 

Little Tech, a descriptor that refers to start-ups, is a term popularised by Andreessen, whose venture firm declared in July that its “political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech”.

Andreessen and Trump are also both supporters of cryptocurrencies. Trump’s campaign rode a wave of support from crypto groups, which spent heavily to back his election campaign. Andreessen’s venture firm has raised billions of dollars to invest in crypto projects.

Amazon’s Message to Nvidia and Anthropic; Andreessen Horowitz’s Latest AI Agent Bet

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Amazon Web Services chief Matt Garman each went out of their way to cast shade at Anthropic and Nvidia, respectively, while they touted Amazon’s new AI models and chips that aim to compete with products from those companies.

“I figured that almost everybody would end up using Anthropic's Claude models...but they're also using Llama models, and they're also using Mistral models, and they're also using some of our own models... This kind of surprised us,” Jassy said during a keynote speech.

Did it actually surprise him, though? Amazon executives for the past two years have consistently borrowed language from Lord of the Rings in stating there would be “no one AI model to rule them all.”

In any case, Jassy suggested Amazon’s most advanced new model (some features of which we previewed last week) is basically as good as Anthropic’s (and OpenAI’s) latest models, and, notably, is priced more than three times less than those models.

The dig at Anthropic doesn’t change the startup’s importance to Amazon, however. Amazon is putting $8 billion into Anthropic, and Anthropic is spending much of that capital to rent Amazon’s cloud servers. And Amazon seems to be returning the favor by saying Tuesday it is building a large server cluster for Anthropic so the startup can keep up with OpenAI and Google.

Then there was Amazon’s valiant effort to convince cloud customers to use Amazon AI server chips instead of Nvidia’s as they develop and run AI applications. Nvidia’s dominance has been hard to shake, in part because AI programmers are so used to writing apps using Nvidia’s proprietary programming language, Cuda, and because its chips are the most powerful on the market. So far that’s been OK for cloud providers like Amazon, as they have made bank from renting out Nvidia-powered servers.

But Amazon, like Google and Microsoft, has soldiered on with its own chips so it isn’t entirely dependent on Nvidia. Why shouldn’t it? After all, the chip giant has its own cloud and software ambitions that has brought it into conflict with AWS in the past.

Garman said Amazon’s new AI chips, Trainium 2, were a much better value for AI developers than Nvidia’s flagship H100 chip. And he said Anthropic would be using a big cluster of Trainium chips to develop future models.

Amazon also turned heads by bringing an executive from Apple to help make the case that Amazon’s technologies—both the new AI models and its server chips—are just as good as anyone else’s. The Apple executive, Benoit Dupin, said Apple uses AWS’ Graviton server chips and is in the “early stages” of evaluating the new Trainium chips for AI. More here.

To be sure, Apple is already a huge customer of Amazon’s servers, and it wasn’t immediately clear how much of Amazon’s AI software it was using. Apple has many vendors—it is arguably Google Cloud’s most important customer and uses that company’s AI chips too.

The surprise Apple appearance seemed to have the intended effect: a slew of headlines in the business press.

Amazon’s shading of Anthropic and Nvidia stood in stark contrast to its conference a year ago, when the CEOs of both of those companies appeared on stage with Amazon executives.

It shows just how quickly things are changing in AI. Exclusive alliances are breaking apart (e.g. this and this) and everyone is angling to get as much of the enterprise IT budget as they can—especially given that budgets aren’t growing very much, despite the AI boom.

Three members of Google’s NotebookLM team, including its team lead and designer, have announced they are leaving Google for a new stealth startup.

On LinkedIn, ex-team lead Raiza Martin said she and her two other co-founders, designer Jason Spielman and engineer Stephen Hughes, “couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s a massive opportunity to build something transformative in this space.”

The startup is in full stealth mode with only a bare-bones website that gives no details about its purpose or even its name. It’s not clear if the startup will focus on things that NotebookLM went viral for, such as AI-generated podcasts and AI-assisted note-taking, or if it will do something totally different.

In comments to TechCrunch, Martin gave few details but hinted that the startup would be consumer-facing, emphasizing the team wanted to create something that leverages the latest AI models to build something useful to regular people.

“As the frontier models and their capabilities continue to grow, thoughtful products are required to make the benefits of this technology accessible, useful, and obvious to everyday people — so our team is going to be focused on building a user-first AI product,” she said.

Martin added that the new startup is in its very early stages and has not announced any funding yet. However, she noted that “support outside of Google (from fellow founders, investors, academics, people who want to join) has been tremendous and it’s been really encouraging for our small team.”

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