Adelaide, the leader in attention-based media quality measurement, has acquired Rita, a privacy-friendly marketing insights company, in an all-stock transaction aimed at enhancing its models with deterministic behavioural data, ad exposure data, and outcomes. Through this acquisition, John Arts, CEO of Rita, along with his core team of developers and data scientists, will join Adelaide.
Rita leverages EU data regulations to gather rich data feeds from a growing community of 200,000 members, rewarding users for sharing insights into their online behaviours across platforms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The Rita app empowers individuals to invoke their Right to Access (RTA), enabling them to view, control, and monetise the data collected by Big Tech companies. Rita’s platform has developed AI and analytics products from this dataset, providing competitive insights to brands like Skyscanner, Just-eat, and HelloFresh.
This acquisition underscores Adelaide’s commitment to delivering a media quality metric that predicts outcomes with unparalleled accuracy. Adelaide’s AU metric is a 0–100 score reflecting any placement’s probability of attention and subsequent impact. It combines attention metrics, device signals, and full-funnel outcome data to measure media quality and covers 95% of a typical media buy. Given the critical role of outcome data in Adelaide’s AU models, Rita’s rich behavioural data will enhance the predictive accuracy of AU.
Adelaide’s investment will also accelerate the global expansion of Rita’s panel, improving data quality and increasing the breadth of insights available to Adelaide’s clients. The expanded panel will create new opportunities for Adelaide to train its AU models, enhancing the AU’s precision in linking ad exposures to subsequent actions, including product searches, website visits, app installations, and purchases.
“John and I share a vision of empowering individuals to reclaim control of their data and actively participate in the data marketplace,” said Marc Guldimann, CEO & founder of Adelaide. “Adelaide will utilise Rita's data in a completely privacy-friendly manner to continue refining the accuracy and utility of AU.”
For Guldimann, Adelaide's acquisition of Rita is a return to familiar territory. Over a decade ago, he founded Enliken, a startup with a similar mission of giving consumers control over their data.
“The Rita team is thrilled to join Adelaide,” said John Arts, co-founder & CEO of Rita. “Marc and I are very aligned on the problems and needed changes in today's data economy. We aim to bring transparency to the industry and put power in the hands of the individual.”
Adelaide will use Rita’s privacy-friendly data solely to improve media quality measurement; it will not be repurposed for targeting, personalisation, or attribution. As a result, Adelaide will not compete with other panel companies, and Rita will retain its market independence, continuing to provide its insights products to e-commerce brands.