Yesterday, PaidContent broke the news of GSI’s acquisition of ClearSaleing. The former is a ~ten year old company that started out building storefronts and providing fulfillment for sports retailers, then evolved into somewhat of a performance-based media agency. The latter is a new venture-backed dashboard for engagement mapping.
Writ large, it’s a good example of the movement away from media buying/management (a low growth opportunity) to the provision of holistic actionable insights, where demand current exceeds supply. Seems like a smart move by GSI.
And big CONGRATS are in order to the folks at ClearSaleing.
Where I scratch my head a bit: if GSI is an agency-in-transition (read: does the heavy lifting), and ClearSaleing provides data visualization (read: dashboard), where does the data itself come from that lights up the insights? Seems like a large gap that can’t be ignored. 
Analogy: you have a movie production studio with a bunch of actors (think ‘agency’), and a big TV (think ‘dashboard’). You could spend a lot of time in front of that TV without seeing anything interesting…
Popularity: 2% [?]
The data comes from matching the customer key on the website with view through and click through data from all ad servers and search engines.