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Ketch Announces Enterprise Marketing Preference Management to Power Permissioned, AI-Ready Data

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TC Transcontinental Acquires PDI Group to Accelerate Growth of its In-Store Marketing Activities

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Expanded integrations, enterprise-grade preference center capabilities, and advanced orchestration will help brands collect and activate zero-party data

Ketch, the AI Privacy Company, announced enhanced capabilities for its Marketing Preference Management product to help enterprise brands drive stronger customer engagement and revenue growth through permissioned, “zero-party” data.

AI is reshaping how brands engage customers, raising the stakes for how data is collected and used. Fragmented systems and inconsistent data, however, leave marketers unsure about what they can confidently activate. When consent, preferences, and customer attributes aren’t synchronized across platforms, personalization breaks down and engagement declines. Marketing tools assume permission is handled elsewhere, while most privacy tools are compliance-first, not customer-first. As a result, enterprises are forced into a false choice between growth and governance.

Ketch Marketing Preference Management redefines the collection and activation of high-value customer data by turning permissioning into an always-on, active-everywhere capability for the modern marketer.

Built on Ketch permissioning infrastructure, Ketch Marketing Preference Management enables brands to collect high-value zero-party data – information customers intentionally share with a brand – and activate it seamlessly across complex martech ecosystems, including systems like Salesforce, Segment, and Braze. By unifying consent, communication preferences, privacy choices, and personalization controls in one system, Ketch ensures data is clean, synchronized, and ready for AI-enabled activation.

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“Consent moments are some of the most overlooked real estate in digital engagement,” said Tom Chavez, Co-Founder and CEO of Ketch. “A cookie banner isn’t just a compliance requirement – it’s an opportunity to engage with a prospective customer. We built Marketing Preference Management so brands can converge consent and preference experiences into opportunities for permissioned, zero-party data capture to fuel AI, growth, and customer engagement initiatives.”

Core product innovations include:

  • Zero-Party Data Enablement: Progressive, permissioned profiling and dynamic experiences that encourage customers to share declared, high-value data across their digital journeys.
  • Data Harmonization: Orchestrated synchronization of consent, preferences, and customer attributes across all activation platforms, AI, and data initiatives.
  • Enterprise-Grade Preference Center: A highly customizable, pixel-perfect interface integrating privacy, communication, and personalization controls.
  • Plug-and-Play Deployment: Native integrations and streamlined implementation without heavy engineering lift.

Marketing teams often capture data that never reaches the right systems. Preferences become siloed, personalization suffers, and engagement declines – not because trust is broken, but because experiences lack relevance. Ketch helps brands generate more usable customer data, ensure consistency across platforms, and create meaningful dialogue that benefits consumers while driving topline growth.

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“Marketing teams have spent the last decade building increasingly sophisticated ways to activate customer data, but the systems for managing consent and customer preferences still aren’t connected to the channels and platforms where activation happens,” said Jon Suarez-Davis, Chief Strategy Officer at Transparent Partners. “As AI raises the stakes for data quality and trust, brands need unified systems that keep consent, customer preferences, and activation synchronized across channels and throughout the martech stack.”

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OpenX and TVision Launch First Supply-Side Attention Targeting Solution for CTV, Enabling Real-Time Activation on High-Engagement Inventory

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OpenX and TVision Launch First Supply-Side Attention Targeting Solution for CTV, Enabling Real-Time Activation on High-Engagement Inventory

OpenX

The new integration turns CTV attention measurement into a real-time activation signal, improving brand recall and message retention.

Shirofune Launches Real-Time Amazon Ads Automation Feature Designed for Peak Sales Events During the Holidays

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Shirofune ensures that no one needs to be glued to the ad management screen during peak sales events – the new feature increases sales with real-time automatic optimization

Shirofune Inc. announced the launch of a new feature within its advertising operations automation platform designed to automatically optimize Amazon advertising performance during major sales events such as Amazon’s Prime Days or Cyber Mondays.

High-traffic sales periods and limited-time promotions typically bring sharp increases in demand, intensified bidding competition, and significant fluctuations in search volume and cost per click. While these events offer major revenue opportunities for advertisers and brands, they also require constant monitoring and rapid bid adjustments to stay within budget or maintain target return on ad spend (ROAS).

“Sales events are moments when advertising performance can change dramatically from hour to hour, but they’ve traditionally required marketers to be constantly on standby to react,” said Mitsunaga Kikuchi, Founder and CEO of Shirofune. “With this release, we’re enabling advertisers to set clear business goals for sale days and trust the system to make precise, real-time adjustments automatically—improving both results and the sustainability of ad operations.”

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Shirofune’s new feature automates these operational adjustments by continuously monitoring cost progression and performance on an hourly basis throughout a specified sales day. Advertisers can choose to automatically maximize sales within a defined budget or maximize sales while maintaining a target ROAS, without the need for manual intervention.

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Until now, advertisers often needed to monitor campaigns continuously—from midnight through the end of a sale period, including weekends and holidays—to manually adjust bids based on real-time performance in order to avoid overspending or reduced profitability.

By executing fine-grained bid optimizations at a frequency and precision that would be difficult for human operators to match, the new functionality helps advertisers improve performance while significantly reducing operational workload. The automation also supports a healthier work-life balance for advertising teams during high-pressure sales periods.

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Auxia Surpasses 100 Billion Autonomous Decisions, as Agentic AI Reshapes Marketing for Enterprises

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Liferay Introduces Headless CMS to Modernize Digital Content Management

AI-native platform processes 10 billion events and delivers 400 million decisions each day, helping Fortune 500 clients power real-time customer personalization

Auxia, the Agentic Customer Journey Orchestration Platform built to help marketers curate AI-powered, hyper-personalized customer experiences, announced it has delivered 100 billion cumulative decisions on behalf of its customers.

The milestone reflects a broader market shift: marketing teams at large enterprises are moving beyond generative AI pilots and deploying autonomous systems that directly drive revenue. Auxia’s platform of AI agents now powers 400 million autonomous decisions each day — selecting content, optimizing timing, and determining next-best actions for individual users across channels like web, app, email — while processing 200 petabytes of first-party data annually.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Customer Impact

Auxia’s growth is anchored in measurable business outcomes for its customers. In 2025:

  • A single enterprise deployment generated $12 million in incremental revenue impact within its first year on the platform.
  • Customers saw click-through rates increase 5x and cross-sell lifetime value rise 84% compared to prior rules-based systems, with implementations completed in weeks, not months.
  • One customer achieved a 50x increase in new sign-ups after replacing a rules-based personalization stack with Auxia’s agent-driven approach.

Major Customer Wins: Secured and expanded partnerships with Fortune 500, Global 2000, and industry leaders in media, SaaS, insurance, mobile and entertainment. The expanded client roster now includes leaders such as Atlassian, Assurant, The Guardian, Comcast, Mercari, MUFG and NTT Docomo.

“Enterprise leaders are replacing rigid, rules-based marketing stacks with intelligent agents that optimize customer value in real time. One hundred billion decisions is not just a scale milestone — it is proof that agentic AI delivers measurable top-line impact, not just operational efficiency.”

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— Sandeep Menon, Co-Founder and CEO, Auxia

Product Innovation & Scale

Auxia delivered a steady cadence of product breakthroughs in 2025, transforming what marketing teams can do with autonomous AI:

  • New Analyst agent and AI-Native UX: Launched a new Analyst agent capable of converting complex campaign data into natural language revenue insights, effectively giving every marketer a dedicated data scientist.
  • AI-native interface: Introduced a unified interface that brings decisioning, content generation, and insights into a single view, enabling marketing teams to manage AI-driven campaigns without technical resources.
  • Infrastructure Scale: Scaled the platform to handle over 10 billion events per day, with peak loads of 15,000 queries per second, a 3x increase in capacity since early 2025.

Growth and Momentum

Fueled by a strengthened team and deepening customer adoption, Auxia scaled rapidly across key dimensions of the business:

  • Rapid Adoption & Expansion: Customers deployed Auxia across more teams, channels, and use cases, growing monthly decisions per customer 6x YoY and generating a robust 176% net dollar retention (NDR) rate.
  • Team and Leadership: Quadrupled headcount year-over-year, with several key hires: Rich Anstett joined Auxia as its new Chief Revenue Officer, bringing 25 years leading global GTM teams across high-growth SaaS and enterprise software, including CRO roles at SmartRecruiters and Culture Amp. Other leaders include Yoshi Tsugu, who oversees Auxia’s presence in Japan; Eric Barbour, the new VP of Product Marketing; product manager Prinka Wadhwa; and engineering leads Nagaraj Hatti and Siddardha Garimella.
  • Global Footprint: Expanded operations to serve a growing international customer base, with offices now established in Palo Alto, Tokyo, and Bangalore.

The company’s momentum follows a $23.5 million Series A round led by VMG Technology Partners a year ago, which funded accelerated product development and enterprise go-to-market expansion.

“CMOs can finally achieve excellence in customer lifetime value. Auxia’s ability to scale autonomous, 1:1 decisioning across billions of customer interactions is exactly the kind of capability shift we backed them to deliver.”

— Indy Guha, General Partner at VMG Technology Partners

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CANAL+ and Google Cloud Form Strategic Partnership on AI

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CANAL+ and Google Cloud Form Strategic Partnership on AI

CANAL+ will use Google Cloud’s AI technology to optimize content recommendations and propel video creativity

CANAL+ and Google Cloud have announced a new multi-year partnership focused on artificial intelligence. Starting in June 2026, CANAL+ will deploy Google Cloud’s latest generative AI technologies across European and African markets where the CANAL+ App is available, unlocking a new era of creative possibilities for the group.

Tailor‑made entertainment experience with Google Cloud content video indexing

Using Google Cloud’s technologies, CANAL+ will accelerate the content video indexing of its extensive content library. The new content classification will provide the global media and entertainment group with an in-depth multimodal database combining sound, video, and text data.

This increased granularity in content classification, will enable smarter, more personalized content recommendations on the homepage of the CANAL+ App, matching each subscriber’s preferences according to their viewing habits. This will make it easier than ever for subscribers to discover even more content they love on CANAL+.

CANAL+’s multimodal database of video-content paves the way for a wide range of opportunities – from enhanced content discovery to entirely new business models.

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A new creative frontier fueled by innovation and faster experimentation cycles

CANAL+ will also leverage Veo3, Google’s new genAI video technology, to provide its production partners and creative teams with tools that will unlock the creative ambitions of their talent, for instance, previsualizing a scene before shooting it or recreating historical moments from a single archival photo.

The partnership guarantees a very secure technical environment, where rights, assets ownership are deeply protected. Using these tools & platform, CANAL+’s partners will have full control of their production and editorial decision, with opportunities to try new approaches while ensuring cost control, thanks to significantly shorter experimentation cycles.  This secure technical platform and tools will be made available to production who wish to use it in films supported by CANAL+.

Stéphane Baumier, Chief Technology Officer of CANAL+: “We are pleased to leverage Google Cloud’s most advanced AI technologies to drive CANAL+’s technical innovation. Building on a long-standing collaboration with Google, this strategic partnership paves the way for limitless possibilities. Content video indexing for CANAL+ at scale gives the group a significant edge, notably by enabling us to deliver sharper discovery and truly enhanced personalized journeys on the CANAL+ App across all our markets. Creativity is the cornerstone of CANAL+’s content production. We are excited to push creative boundaries by providing creators with tools that enable AI-generated video scenes, impossible to produce using traditional methods.”

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Matt Renner, President, Chief Revenue Officer – Google Cloud: “The entertainment industry is at a pivotal inflection point where the intersection of creativity and compute power defines market leadership. Our deepened collaboration with CANAL+ is a testament to a shared culture of relentless innovation. By leveraging Google Cloud’s generative AI technologies, CANAL+ is not just adopting tools; they are architecting the future of media and fundamentally transforming the entertainment landscape on a global scale.”

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Infotools Launches Harmoni 3, Ushering in A New Era of AI-guided Data Exploration

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Infotools Launches Harmoni 3, Ushering in A New Era of AI-guided Data Exploration

ChatHarmoni plus a suite of new enhancements elevate insight discovery with assisted exploration, smarter analytics, and methodical reporting.

Infotools, a pioneer in market research analysis and reporting for over three decades, announced the launch of Harmoni 3 (H3), the most significant evolution of its insights platform to date, following a complete re-engineering of the data analysis and reporting platform.

Along with significant speed and processing-power enhancements, the release introduces ChatHarmoni, a generative-AI research companion that works alongside market research and insights professionals to uncover meaning and understanding in the data.

Ant Franklin, CEO of Infotools, said, “We’ve spent more than 36 years refining how researchers interact with survey data by developing innovative tools that maintain a high level of rigor, transparency and curiosity that define good research.”

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Infotools’ selective approach to AI means Harmoni users can leverage but aren’t reliant on artificial intelligence to conduct their core responsibilities. Franklin continued, “ChatHarmoni directs researchers toward what matters most, and makes them even more efficient when using the time-tested strengths of Harmoni as part of their insight generation processes.”

An innovative yet technical differentiation taken by Infotools concerns LLM selection. By default, ChatHarmoni uses a secure AI gateway to provide data-protected access to several commercial LLMs. This AI gateway is an enterprise-grade, closed environment that is developed, trained, and refined by Ipsos specifically for the market research and insights industry. However, Franklin says, “We respect that some organizations may be more comfortable using their AI environments. And because data security and privacy are as paramount to us as they are our clients, the AI functionality of Harmoni can be configured to let organizations use their existing LLM billing accounts.”

Harmoni 3’s upgraded interface makes exploration more fluid, collaborative and global with drag-and-drop interactions, customizable dashboards and automatic data-flow scheduling. Highly complex and granular table investigation is possible with multiple nesting in both directions, plus drill-in allows for richer respondent-level exploration when validating trends and human stories behind the numbers.

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John Bird, Executive Vice President Client Development at Infotools said, “Harmoni forms the foundation of a growing number of complex market research programs – from global enterprises to world-class agencies. H3 brings data, automation and visualization together in one environment so teams can deliver more consistent insights faster than ever to their stakeholders. The enhancements in Harmoni 3 strengthen that foundation, giving researchers and the marketers they work with new ways to interrogate data, validate findings and communicate results with confidence.”

Acquired by Ipsos in 2021 after more than a decade of collaboration, Infotools continues to power Ipsos’ internal analysis and reporting through the Harmoni platform, enabling researchers and clients alike to access and share insights through a single, secure environment. Harmoni (through the Infotools team) is also trusted by and works directly with many leading global brands to simplify complex research data, uncover meaningful patterns and share insights across teams.

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Sinch launches Voice Relay to give AI agents a voice

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Sinch launches Voice Relay to give AI agents a voice

Sinch AB (publ) announced at Enterprise Connect new innovations across its Enterprise Voice platform, including Voice Relay, a new capability that enables developers to connect text-based AI agents directly to live phone calls. The announcement introduces Voice Relay in early access release, alongside AI-ready voice infrastructure, enhanced branded calling protection and expanded global network capabilities designed to help enterprises build secure, scalable customer conversations.

While conversational AI models have advanced rapidly, deploying AI agents in real-time voice interactions introduces complex challenges related to latency, telecom infrastructure, and fraud protection. Sinch provides the communications infrastructure that enables enterprises to bring AI-powered conversations to the global telephone network.

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“Voice remains one of the most powerful channels for customer engagement, and enterprises are increasingly looking to bring AI into those interactions,” said Julia Fraser, EVP Americas at Sinch. “Voice Relay allows developers to connect AI agents to the global telephone network quickly and reliably, helping them automate routine calls, reduce wait times and resolve issues faster without having to build and manage complex voice infrastructure themselves.

Many interactions take place over the phone, where real-time conversations remain crucial for high- stakes or high-priority resolution. Leveraging AI for voice interactions has historically required the management of complex audio streaming infrastructure, speech recognition services, text-to-speech systems and latency optimization. Voice Relay simplifies this process by allowing developers to connect AI agents built on large language models directly to live voice calls.

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With Voice Relay, Sinch manages the real-time conversational loop during a call, including speech recognition, voice synthesis and interruption handling. Developers can integrate AI agents with Sinch’s global voice network using a simple interface while Sinch handles the underlying complexity of real-time voice interactions.

“Enterprises want the freedom to choose the AI models that power their agents,” said Daniel Morris, Chief Product Officer at Sinch. “Voice Relay provides the infrastructure that connects those agents to the global voice network, delivering the real-time media, reliability and control required to run AI-powered voice interactions in production.”

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Allstacks Launches Agent to Close the Spec Gap Limiting AI-Assisted Development

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Allstacks Launches Agent to Close the Spec Gap Limiting AI-Assisted Development

Spec Readiness Agent Evaluates and Refines Work Items So Both Software Engineers and AI Coding Tools can Execute With Certainty

Allstacks, an agentic software engineering intelligence platform, launched the Spec Readiness Agent, an AI agent that evaluates and improves software specifications so engineering teams and AI  agents can build accurately to product expectations. Alongside the release, Allstacks is introducing its Design Partner Program, offering 90-day unlimited spec readiness analysis at allstacks.ai/spec-readiness.

Why Specs and Why Now
As organizations move toward agentic development workflows, where AI autonomously generates code, the quality and clarity of specs become the control surface that determines whether AI accelerates delivery or accelerates rework. No tool today systematically evaluates specifications with the full context of the codebase. Allstacks changes that with the Spec Readiness Agent.

“As AI takes a bigger role in writing code, the direction given in specs determines whether AI accelerates delivery or accelerates rework,” said Jeremy Freeman, Chief Technology Officer, Allstacks. “We designed, tested, and deployed our Spec Readiness Agent with significant success in guiding AI-assisted development for better quality software. It keeps getting better and we’re opening the Design Partner Program to put it in the hands of teams who’ll help us sharpen it against more organizational complexity.”

What passed as specifications before will not work going forward. Software engineers have business knowledge that lets them fill in what a spec does not say. AI agents, meanwhile, consume requirements literally and therefore compound spec gaps, software costs, and developer time. Industry and DORA research confirms that incomplete specifications cause code review and testing time to more than double.

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What the Agent Does

The Spec Readiness Agent connects to Jira, Azure DevOps, or Linear and answers readiness questions across three modes: epics, sprints, and tickets. Is this epic complete enough to deliver the business goal — and what’s still missing? Will the work in this sprint actually move things forward? Is this ticket clear enough that a developer will know what to do without stopping to ask questions? The Spec Readiness Agent assigns readiness scores, and when a gap is identified, it generates paste-ready remediation, including suggested acceptance criteria, recommended edge cases, and draft stories for missing work.

“I want every feature that comes into quarterly planning to go through this,” said a senior engineering manager at an Allstacks customer. “Is this specification accurate enough for engineering to pick up? Does it have requirements with exit criteria? Does it have a design? Is engineering actually going to be able to execute against this spec with certainty?”

The Spec Readiness Agent joins the Allstacks agent portfolio alongside the Delivery Risk Agent that was launched in October 2025. Both operate on a shared context graph – a normalized data layer that maps relationships across project management, source control, CI/CD, and quality systems. Delivery risk tells leaders which initiatives are in trouble and what to do about it; spec readiness identifies and corrects specification issues before they become problematic.

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The Design Partner Program
Allstacks is looking for engineering teams that are actively navigating the shift to AI-assisted development and are experiencing the challenges caused by incomplete specifications to join their Design Partner Program and use it to improve their specs in their complex workflows.

Allstacks Design Partner Program members receive:

  • The Spec Readiness Agent with 90-days of unlimited work item analysis
  • A direct Allstacks contact and structured feedback sessions
  • Input into the agent’s evaluation criteria, remediation capabilities, and roadmap

The Spec Readiness Agent is available as a standalone component and Design Partner members do not need to deploy the full Allstacks platform.

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Nextdoor Announces Anthony Di Muccio as Vice President of North America Sales

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Nextdoor Announces Anthony Di Muccio as Vice President of North America Sales

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Digital media veteran joins Nextdoor to lead North America sales as the company accelerates its advertising platform growth and expands self-serve capabilities to Canada

Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. , the essential neighborhood network, announced the appointment of Anthony Di Muccio as Vice President of North America Sales, effective March 10th. Di Muccio will report to Chief Revenue Officer Michael Kiernan, leading Nextdoor’s North America sales organization — including U.S. regional teams and the Canadian advertising market — to deepen brand and agency relationships and drive the next phase of revenue growth.

Di Muccio brings more than two decades of digital media advertising and sales leadership experience to Nextdoor. Most recently, he served as Head of National Sales at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, where he led teams across enterprise, strategic, and mobile media sales, spearheading initiatives to maximize advertising revenue and drive growth for innovative ad solutions. Prior to T-Mobile, Di Muccio spent more than seven years at Snap Inc. in a series of leadership roles, including U.S. Head of Retail & eCommerce, U.S. Head of Travel, and Head of Mid-Market East Sales, where he was instrumental in shaping the company’s go-to-market strategy, building and scaling key verticals and developing the company’s mid-market sales strategy. Earlier in his career, he held roles at mobile video startup Vessel — acquired by Verizon Media — and rose through the ranks at Hulu.

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The hire comes at a pivotal moment for Nextdoor’s advertising business, as the company continues to make significant investments in its ads platform to give brands the precision and performance they need — bolstered by privacy-safe, first-party Verified Location Identity data — to reach real, verified neighbors at scale. Investments include:

  • AI-powered click optimization is now live for advertisers in the US and UK. In initial testing, over 11 months during 2024–2025, US advertisers saw an average 134% lift in CTR compared to CPM bidding.
  • Conversion optimization delivered a median 35% improvement in average CPA, over 11 months during 2024–2025, helping move neighbors from discovery to action with less manual effort for US advertisers.
  • Expanded video ad formats across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, enabling brands to activate sight, sound, and motion across more placements, including Carousel ads, with deeper performance reporting — with continued global investment in video planned.
  • Nextdoor Ads Manager’s self-serve capabilities continue to expand and are now available in Canada and the UK.

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Together, these investments establish Nextdoor as the only ads platform built for local at scale — where verified identity, neighborhood context, and AI-driven performance converge.

“Anthony has spent his career building high-performing sales teams, and he understands what it takes to help brands unlock the power of a truly differentiated audience,” said Michael Kiernan, Chief Revenue Officer at Nextdoor. “Our verified network of more than 105 million neighbors — real people, real locations, real decisions — is something advertisers can’t find anywhere else, and Anthony will help us bring that story to market in a powerful way.”

“Nextdoor has built something genuinely rare: a verified network of real neighbors, real locations, and real decisions — powered by first-party Verified Location Identity data and AI solutions that help brands drive action,” said Anthony Di Muccio, Vice President of North America Sales at Nextdoor. “The opportunity to connect brands with real household decision-makers at scale is enormous, and I can’t wait to get to work.”

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ConvergeHub Earns Strong CRM Ratings on Software Reviews, Reinforcing Customer Trust, Usability, and Business Value

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SoftwareReviews

Strong ratings reinforce ConvergeHub’s role as a trusted CRM partner for growing businesses.

SoftwareReviews scores highlight ConvergeHub’s customer sentiment and renewal intent — strengthening its position as a trusted all-in-one CRM for growing businesses.

Great CRM isn’t just about features — it’s about trust, reliability, and measurable outcomes.”

— Shampa Bagchi, Founder and CEO of ConvergeHub.

“Great CRM isn’t just about features — it’s about trust, reliability, and measurable outcomes. These ratings reflect our commitment to making ConvergeHub easy to adopt, dependable in daily execution, and valuable for growing teams.”
— Shampa Bagchi, Founder and CEO, ConvergeHub

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ConvergeHub, the all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform for small and mid-sized businesses, announced today that it has received strong customer ratings on SoftwareReviews, a leading enterprise software research and review platform. ConvergeHub currently holds a Composite Score of 8.3/10 and a CX Score of 8.5/10, based on customer reviews in the Customer Relationship Management – Small Business category.

In addition to overall product and customer experience scoring, SoftwareReviews’ customer sentiment metrics show ConvergeHub with a +96 Net Emotional Footprint, reflecting 96% positive end-user sentiment (with 2% neutral and 2% negative). SoftwareReviews also reports strong intent indicators, including 94 Likeliness to Recommend, 100 Plan to Renew, and 90 Satisfaction of Cost Relative to Value — signals that align customer confidence with perceived ROI.

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SoftwareReviews’ Awards & Recognition section also lists ConvergeHub as a 2026 Emotional Footprint Champion in its category, along with prior recognition including 2025 Data Quadrant Champion and 2025 Emotional Footprint Champion, underscoring consistent performance across years.

ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing Helps Belfast SMEs Close the Digital Gap with Web Design, SEO, and AI Training

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ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing Helps Belfast SMEs Close the Digital Gap with Web Design, SEO, and AI Training

Profiletree Logo

Northern Ireland SMEs strengthen digital growth as ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing delivers web designing, SEO support, and practical AI training through Future Business Academy.

ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing is helping Belfast SMEs close the digital gap through web design Belfast expertise, SEO strategies across Northern Ireland, and practical AI training for growing businesses. Behind this effort stands a decade of delivery, with more than 1,000 completed projects and over 450 verified five-star reviews. Through Future Business Academy, ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing equips teams with practical AI skills that streamline workflows and strengthen customer engagement.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered at the McSweeney Centre in Belfast, ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing supports businesses across Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom through WordPress web design and digital marketing, including its specialised Belfast web design services. More than 450 verified five-star Google reviews reinforce the agency’s track record of building websites that generate enquiries, strengthen search visibility through SEO Northern Ireland expertise, and enable practical AI adoption.

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“The businesses we work with want digital systems that deliver measurable results,” said Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing and Future Business Academy. “Websites need to rank, content needs to convert, and AI tools must support how teams actually work. For many SMEs, that means moving beyond simply having a website to investing in website development services that create a digital platform capable of consistently generating enquiries and supporting growth.”

Many businesses across Northern Ireland have a website, yet far fewer use it as a reliable source of enquiries or revenue. ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing addresses this gap by integrating its web design expertise with SEO Northern Ireland strategy within the same development process, building WordPress websites designed for search visibility, mobile performance, and long-term content growth.

Website performance plays a decisive role in search visibility and ranking potential. Google evaluates loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability through its Core Web Vitals framework, while more than 60 percent of local searches now occur on mobile devices, meaning businesses relying on WordPress web design risk losing rankings, traffic, and qualified visitors when sites fail to meet these technical performance standards.

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Responding to these challenges, ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing works directly with businesses to strengthen their digital presence. The agency delivers SEO services in Northern Ireland, including technical audits, keyword strategy, content development, and Google Business Profile optimisation. To guide these efforts, the team uses tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog to identify practical opportunities that improve search visibility and website performance. Alongside web design and SEO, it also provides AI training for small businesses through Future Business Academy, where teams learn to use tools like ChatGPT to draft content, summarise documents, manage communications, and build automation workflows that improve efficiency and customer engagement.

Across sectors including professional services, construction, healthcare, retail, and technology, the company helps SMEs turn an online presence into a reliable source of enquiries and sustainable growth. For businesses seeking stronger digital performance, web design, search visibility, and practical AI adoption are no longer optional considerations but core components of modern business strategy.

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Kustomer Launches Standalone Enterprise AI Platform to Modernize Existing Helpdesks

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Kustomer Launches Standalone Enterprise AI Platform to Modernize Existing Helpdesks

The word “kustomer” in lowercase black letters; the u has two dots above it, resembling eyes and creating a smiley face within the text.

The First Enterprise CX AI Platform Bringing Predictive and Deterministic Rule-Based Intelligence to Existing Helpdesks, Without Migration

Kustomer unveiled Kustomer AI, a standalone enterprise AI platform designed to transform how organizations deploy intelligence across their existing customer experience systems. Rather than forcing costly migrations or system overhauls, Kustomer AI operates as an integrated intelligence layer supporting customer helpdesks, marking a fundamental shift from AI as a feature to AI as infrastructure.

Starting today, organizations using Zendesk can activate Kustomer AI as a fully integrated intelligence layer without migration or operational disruption, unlocking enterprise-grade automation while preserving the systems teams already rely on. Salesforce and additional integrations are launching soon.

“With Kustomer AI, we aim to resolve a core challenge in enterprise customer experience,” said Brad Birnbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Kustomer. “AI must adapt to human nuance while maintaining the precision needed for compliance-driven workflows, something most AI tools struggle to balance. Unlike other platforms, we offer both flexibility and control without requiring customers to completely overhaul their CX systems.”

Bridging Adaptive Intelligence with Guaranteed Outcomes

As AI adoption accelerates, CX leaders increasingly grapple with the tension between automation and accountability. Predictive AI models excel at interpreting language, intent, and emotional nuance, yet enterprise environments demand deterministic, rule-based logic for processes such as refunds, compliance enforcement, and escalations.

Kustomer AI is the first CX solution to unify both within a single AI automation framework, powered by Kustomer’s proprietary AI reasoning engine:

  • Predictive Intelligence: Interprets intent, sentiment, natural language, and cross-channel context.
  • Deterministic guidance: Guarantees precise execution of rule-based workflows.

“Our reasoning engine allows businesses to toggle between adaptive and deterministic modes based on specific use cases, ensuring AI interprets nuance where necessary and adheres to strict logic where required,” said Jeremy Suriel, CTO and Co-Founder of Kustomer. “It’s flexible, with built-in guardrails.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Stephen Howard-Sarin, MD of Retail Media, Americas @ Criteo

Enterprise-Grade Transparency, Governance, and Control

Enterprise AI adoption is increasingly shaped by scrutiny around ROI, risk exposure, and accountability. As enterprises evaluate automation performance and governance standards, transparency is no longer optional — it’s foundational. Automation without accountability can erode trust, inflate risk exposure, and obscure true performance gains.

Kustomer AI embeds explainability directly into its architecture, providing:

  • Step-by-step visibility into AI decisions
  • Fully explainable actions and outcomes
  • Traceable resolution logic
  • Auditable workflows for compliance and governance

“If a case is marked as resolved but customer satisfaction drops, leaders need to understand why,” said Lauren Gold, Chief Customer Officer at Kustomer. “Was the correct policy applied? Did the AI overlook context? With Kustomer AI, every decision is transparent and easy to evaluate. Business leaders can investigate, adjust, and optimize performance on their own — without relying on engineers or analytics teams. There is no guessing or post-facto auditing, just confident operation.”

Seamless AI Integration Into Your Existing Helpdesk

Despite strong belief in AI’s potential, many enterprises hesitate due to migration fatigue, long-term vendor contracts, and operational risk. The market has forced teams to choose between standing still, ripping and replacing core systems, or bolting on disconnected AI tools that fragment data and duplicate tickets.

Kustomer AI eliminates that tradeoff.

Built as a standalone intelligence platform, Kustomer AI integrates directly into existing helpdesks, beginning with Zendesk, preserving data integrity, workflows, and reporting structures while adding enterprise-grade intelligence.

“Most teams feel stuck between doing nothing, ripping and replacing, or bolting on AI tools that lack sufficient context,” Gold added. “We built Kustomer AI to remove that constraint. You can capture the benefits of intelligent automation without disrupting the systems your teams rely on. And unlike other AI add-ons that create ticket duplication and messy data, Kustomer AI integrates cleanly into your CX stack — improving outcomes for both customers and the organization.”

Marketing Technology News: From MarTech Stack to MarTech Fabric: Weaving Brand, Content, and Conversion Into One Thread

Intelligence Across the CX Organization

Kustomer AI enhances every layer of the support organization:

For customers:
AI agents resolve routine questions instantly across channels using full customer history and real-time context, delivering faster resolutions and more personalized experiences.

For support teams:
Agents receive complete customer history, relevant knowledge, and real-time recommendations, reducing research time in-the-moment and increasing confidence during complex interactions.

For CX leaders:
AI transforms every interaction into insight, surfacing trends, optimizing workflows, generating knowledge, and delivering real-time visibility into performance and sentiment.

Early customers including Aplazo and Goody report measurable gains in automation efficiency and customer satisfaction while maintaining operational continuity.

“Within the first quarter, we saw AI handling up to 65 percent of routine inquiries during peak periods,” said Maria Alvarez, VP of Customer Experience at Aplazo. “What impressed us most was the transparency. We can see exactly how decisions are made, adjust logic in minutes, and ensure the experience aligns with our brand.”

* AI for Reps and Data Explorer for CX Leaders will be available in Kustomer AI for Zendesk from mid-April.

Building the Agentic Future of Customer Experience

Customer experience is entering a new era.

The next generation of CX platforms will not be systems of record, they will be systems of intelligent action

“AI can no longer be an experiment or a bolt-on feature that lacks access to rich customer data, it must operate as an intelligent system embedded directly into the fabric of service,” Birnbaum added. “Our vision has always been to elevate customer experience from cost center to competitive advantage. Kustomer AI represents the next evolution of that vision: enterprise intelligence that is adaptive, explainable, and built to work within your ecosystem.”

This launch represents the first phase of a broader strategy to embed agentic intelligence across every layer of the CX organization, establishing AI as foundational infrastructure rather than incremental enhancement.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

BrightEdge Launches AI Hyper Cube, Pulling Back the Curtain on How Brands Show Up in AI Search

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BrightEdge Launches AI Hyper Cube, Pulling Back the Curtain on How Brands Show Up in AI Search

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As generative AI reshapes the buying journey, AI Hyper Cube reveals the hidden AI conversations shaping demand

BrightEdge, the global leader in enterprise SEO and AI-driven organic search intelligence, announced AI Hyper Cube, a new platform designed to help brands understand and influence how they appear across AI-powered search and discovery environments like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other generative AI engines.

“The companies that win in the next era of search will be the ones that understand how they appear in AI search and why,” said Jim Yu, CEO at BrightEdge. “It’s no longer just about visibility in search results. Brands need to know where they show up in AI-driven customer journeys, how those systems evaluate them, and which sources shape those outcomes so they can influence recommendations and capture demand.”

BrightEdge also introduced “AI Agent Insights,” a new capability that gives brands visibility into how AI agents interact with their websites. AI Agent Insights helps marketers understand which AI systems are visiting their digital properties, what they are doing, and where they encounter technical friction, including blocked pages, broken paths, and other barriers that may limit visibility in an increasingly agent-driven web.

Together, AI Hyper Cube and AI Agent Insights give organizations both an external view of how AI platforms represent their brands and an internal view of how AI agents access and experience their digital presence.

Marketing Technology News: Martech Interview with Meena Ganesh, Senior Product Marketing Manager @ Box AI

A New Search Capability for the New Search Era

However, most marketing and search tools were built for a pre-AI search environment, leaving brand leaders with little visibility into the hundreds of thousands of AI prompts shaping their category — including:

  • Which AI prompts mention their brand
  • What sources AI systems rely on when generating recommendations
  • How competitors appear alongside them in AI responses
  • Whether AI-generated narratives about their brand are positive, neutral, or negative
  • Where AI is amplifying older issues (e.g., outdated reviews, legacy news, historical controversies) into today’s buying journey

BrightEdge research shows that AI engines frequently rely on a concentrated set of sources when generating recommendations. In some industries, the top five publishers and platforms account for a quarter of all citations in AI-generated recommendations, significantly shaping how brands appear in AI responses.

AI Hyper Cube addresses this, making AI-driven decisions visible, showing the prompts that matter, the sources that drive outcomes, and where brands appear or are missing across the AI customer journey.

Rather than simply identifying platforms that matter, AI Hyper Cube pinpoints the exact content influencing AI recommendations. This allows companies to identify opportunities to win citations, influence recommendations, and strengthen brand presence in AI-driven discovery, while also diagnosing reputational and revenue risks.

With AI Hyper Cube, organizations can analyze how they appear across the full AI-driven customer journey, answering three critical questions:

  1. Which conversations are we part of?
  2. Who is starting these conversations?
  3. How can we get more visible and with the right story?

This analysis helps brands identify where they are strong or missing across different stages of the journey and take more precise actions to influence AI recommendations and capture demand.

By transforming AI search from an opaque environment into a measurable channel, AI Hyper Cube helps companies identify where they do and do not appear across the AI-driven research journey. The platform then translates those insights into actionable strategies across SEO, content, digital PR, and marketing — enabling brands to strengthen visibility in AI-driven discovery while continuing to optimize for traditional search performance.

Marketing Technology News: Feature-Rich to Functionally Effective: Adjusting your Martech Strategy

Transparency in the Algorithm

Built on BrightEdge’s extensive data platform, spanning hundreds of millions of queries and billions of data points across industries, AI Hyper Cube analyzes how brands appear across AI-driven discovery.

For the first time, marketers can see which conversations drive demand at each stage of the AI customer journey, where their brands appear or are missing, and how AI systems evaluate them relative to competitors.

AI Hyper Cube also reveals the exact sources shaping AI recommendations, enabling brands to understand precisely what content influences AI responses for important prompts.

BrightEdge analysis shows that in some industries, the top five sources account for more than a quarter of AI-generated brand recommendations, and that citation visibility among those sources can shift by as much as 100% month-to-month, underscoring the need for continuous monitoring as AI systems evolve.

With this level of visibility, organizations can identify where they are strong or underrepresented across the journey and prioritize actions across SEO, content, digital PR, and partnerships that will influence AI recommendations and capture demand.

BrightEdge Spark: New Event Series on the Future of AI Search

To mark the launch of AI Hyper Cube and explore the future of AI-driven discovery, BrightEdge is hosting Spark, an event series bringing together marketing leaders, AI experts, and digital strategists to discuss how generative AI is transforming search and brand discovery.

The first Spark event will take place in San Francisco on March 10, followed by a second event in New York, on March 12.

These events will feature discussions on how AI is reshaping search behavior, new data insights into AI-driven discovery, and demonstrations of how AI Hyper Cube helps brands navigate this new landscape.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Artificial Intelligence is Killing Cold Outreach: TANDA Digital Introduces NPOT Methodology™ To Reinvent B2B Outbound

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Artificial Intelligence is Killing Cold Outreach: TANDA Digital Introduces NPOT Methodology™ To Reinvent B2B Outbound

As AI floods inboxes with generic outreach, TANDA Digital introduces the NPOT Methodology™ to help B2B companies design outreach offers prospects actually want.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the way businesses communicate with prospects, but it is also accelerating a major problem in B2B marketing: the collapse of traditional cold outreach.

In a world where AI can generate millions of outreach messages overnight, generic cold outreach is becoming obsolete. Companies that continue pitching services in the same way will simply be ignored.”

— Tudor Dumitrescu, Founder of TANDA Digital

As AI tools make it easier than ever to generate large volumes of outreach messages, inboxes and LinkedIn feeds are becoming saturated with templated pitches and generic sales offers. The result is predictable: declining response rates, eroding trust, and growing skepticism from buyers who increasingly ignore outreach messages altogether.

TANDA Digital, a B2B lead generation company specializing in large-scale outbound systems, believes the root of the problem is not simply the rise of artificial intelligence but how most companies approach outbound marketing in the first place.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

Today the company announced the NPOT Methodology™, a proprietary framework designed to help B2B companies replace generic cold outreach with highly relevant outreach offers tailored to specific niches and business problems.

According to TANDA Digital, most outbound campaigns fail because companies begin by pitching their services instead of demonstrating immediate relevance and value to prospects.

The NPOT Methodology™ addresses this challenge by structuring outbound strategy around four core elements:

• Niche – defining a highly specific segment of companies and decision-makers that are most relevant
• Pain / Problem – distinguishing between the unwanted effects (pains) and the underlying causes of those effects (problems). For example, a stomach ache is the pain, while a stomach ulcer is the problem causing it.
• Outreach Offer – designing a small, low-risk micro-solution that helps address a meaningful problem
• Target Outcome – aligning the outreach with the business result the prospect is ultimately trying to achieve

Marketing Technology News: Is the Traditional CDP Already Out of Date?

Rather than asking prospects to purchase a full service immediately, the framework encourages companies to design outreach offers that allow prospects to experience value before committing to a larger engagement.

This concept, referred to as Outreach Offer Design, is central to the methodology.

When markets become crowded with competitors offering similar services, prospects rarely trust claims made in unsolicited outreach messages. The NPOT Methodology™ addresses this trust gap by encouraging businesses to resolve a small but meaningful problem first, demonstrating competence and relevance before proposing a broader solution.

A typical outreach offer may involve providing a targeted analysis, solving a micro-problem, or delivering a small strategic insight tailored to a prospect’s specific situation. These offers are designed to require a small time commitment, such as a short call, while removing the financial risk typically associated with engaging a new vendor.

According to TANDA Digital, this approach reflects a fundamental shift in how outbound marketing must operate in an AI-driven environment.

As AI tools dramatically increase the volume of outreach messages being sent every day, the scarcity that once made personalized outreach effective is disappearing. Simply sending more messages or automating outreach further no longer guarantees results.

Instead, TANDA Digital explains that success in modern B2B outbound depends on designing offers that prospects actually want to engage with.

The NPOT Methodology™ was developed through years of working with B2B companies operating in highly competitive markets. During that time, TANDA Digital observed a consistent pattern: companies that positioned their outreach around specific problems and outcomes consistently generated stronger engagement than those that focused primarily on selling services.

By structuring outreach strategy around niche-specific problems and targeted micro-offers, the framework aims to restore relevance to outbound communication and create more meaningful conversations between businesses and potential clients.

“In the past, outbound worked because fewer companies were doing it,” Tudor Dumitrescu explained. “Today everyone is doing it and AI is making it easier than ever to scale. The companies that win in this new environment will be the ones that rethink the offer itself.”

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape marketing and sales workflows the NPOT Methodology™ will become increasingly important for companies seeking to maintain trust, relevance, and engagement in their outbound efforts.

For B2B companies navigating this new landscape, the message from is clear: the future of outbound will not be defined by how many messages are sent but by how meaningful those messages are to the people receiving them.

Video.js v10 Delivers 81% Smaller Bundles as Four Major Player Projects Converge

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TwelveLabs Launches Ecosystem Partner Program to Extend Video Intelligence in the Enterprise

Mux logo

Open source collective reinvents web video players, with minimal adaptive bitrate player now 38kB gzipped vs. typical 200kB

In an unprecedented convergence of competing open source projects, the teams behind Video.js, Plyr, Vidstack, and Media Chrome today released the beta of Video.js v10, a complete architectural rebuild of the world’s most popular open source video player serving billions of video plays monthly. The beta release achieves performance breakthroughs that legacy architectures made impossible: 81% smaller default bundles compared to Video.js v8, with minimal implementations as small as 5kB gzipped, while allowing developers to add and remove capabilities through genuine modular design.

Today’s players approach a megabyte in size, creating monolithic cores. Video.js v10 abandons that architecture entirely.”

— Steve Heffernan, creator of Video.js & co-founder of Mux

The convergence represents a rare moment where the four competing projects totaling more than 75,000 GitHub stars set aside separate codebases to build something better together. When the Video.js Technical Steering Committee approved Mux as corporate steward in 2025, it brought the project full circle: original creator Steve Heffernan, who built Video.js in 2010 and co-founded Mux while remaining on the Video.js steering committee, returned to lead development and address technical debt that made deeper optimization almost impossible.

“Today’s players often approach a megabyte in size (minified only) creating monolithic cores that can’t simultaneously hit loading performance goals for short-form video and feature requirements for complex use cases,” said Heffernan. “Video.js v10 abandons that architecture entirely. The UI separates from the underlying media renderer, with every component working independently through open API contracts.” Legacy web video players typically exceed 600kB gzipped when adaptive streaming is included, with some approaching a megabyte minified.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

Video.js has powered video playback for enterprises including Amazon, Microsoft, Zoom, Bloomberg, Wells Fargo, and LinkedIn while serving millions of smaller sites. The project has earned 38,700 GitHub stars and supports 573 community-built plugins, establishing itself as critical player infrastructure. However, web performance standards and growing player weight created pressure that legacy architectures couldn’t address without the kind of cross-project collaboration that Video.js v10 represents. For the billions of people who watch video on the web daily, player bundle size translates directly to how quickly video loads.

Video.js v10 incorporates media/UI separation from Media Chrome, framework-idiomatic customization from Vidstack, design polish from Plyr, and 16 years of battle-hardened production experience from Video.js. The unified architecture enables capabilities impossible in legacy players: developers import only required components, with unused code eliminated from bundles rather than merely disabled.

Marketing Technology News: Is the Traditional CDP Already Out of Date?

The rebuild does represent risk. Breaking API compatibility threatens to fragment Video.js’s massive plugin ecosystem, with migration of existing plugins dependent on community contribution. The team acknowledges this tension directly: legacy architecture would condemn the project to irrelevance, while a complete rebuild gambles on community support to recreate the plugin ecosystem on modern foundations.

The modular foundation and common JS core position Video.js v10 for capabilities that monolithic players struggle to accommodate. The architecture creates clear integration points for AI-augmented video features. Its less-abstracted components allow AI agents to work directly with player code with minimal external documentation.

The modular approach extends to the streaming engine layer as well. Video.js v10 introduces SPF (Streaming Processor Framework), a new engine architecture built around composable functional components rather than monolithic controllers. Where traditional streaming engines bundle support for DRM, ads, and other advanced capabilities regardless of whether a project needs them, SPF offers purpose-built engines containing only required functionality. Video.js v10 works with existing engines including HLS.js today, with SPF targeting simpler, common use cases where it is expected to achieve a 12.1kB gzipped engine bundle compared to 103kB for the lightest current alternative.

The Video.js v10 beta ships two professionally designed skins: a default skin with a frosted aesthetic and a minimal skin for developers who want a clean starting point, both with refined controls, smooth interactions, and thoughtful animations. The architecture uses unstyled UI primitives with a custom compiler translating skins from React and Tailwind into multiple framework combinations. Developers can eject any skin to receive full source code ownership, following the shadcn model. Framework-specific components provide idiomatic experiences in React and HTML, with additional framework support planned for general availability.

The beta also ships three use-case presets: default video, default audio, and background video. These are purpose-built combinations of skin, features, and media configuration that give developers a correct starting point without sacrificing the composable flexibility underneath.

Video.js remains fully open source under Apache 2.0 license with transparent governance through its Technical Steering Committee. The Video.js v10 beta is available today at Videojs.org, with general availability planned for mid-2026.

Hawke Media Named a 2026 Google Premier Partner, Recognized as a Top Google Ads Agency

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Hawke Media | Advertising & Marketing - Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce

Santa Monica-based marketing agency Hawke Media has achieved 2026 Premier Partner status in the Google Partners program, recognizing the company as a top Google partner among the highest-performing agencies managing Google Ads campaigns.

Hawke Media’s team of experts provides full-funnel, data-driven marketing strategy and execution across paid search, paid social, media buying, email and SMS marketing, conversion rate optimization, SEO, creative, and analytics. Serving brands ranging from high-growth startups to established global companies, Hawke Media delivers customized marketing strategies as an outsourced CMO for businesses across a wide variety of industries. Explore the full range of offerings at https://hawkemedia.com/services/

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

“We’re proud to once again be recognized as a Google Premier Partner,” said Erik Huberman, Founder and CEO of Hawke Media. “Our long-standing partnership with Google allows us to stay at the forefront of performance marketing, ensuring our clients benefit from the latest tools, insights, and strategies to drive measurable growth.”

Google recognized the achievements of top-performing digital marketing partners across the globe by awarding Premier Partner status as part of the Google Partners program. Hawke Media has been named a 2026 Premier Partner, which means:

Marketing Technology News: Is the Traditional CDP Already Out of Date?

– They’re among the top 3% of Google Partners participants in their respective countries, signaling their leading expertise in Google Ads, as well as their ability to forge new client relationships and support their clients’ growth.

– They’re listed on the Google Partners directory, which helps potential clients find top Premier Partners like Hawke Media on their own dedicated page.

– They receive exclusive benefits that promote client growth and success with Google Ads.

Rokt mParticle Makes Match Boost and Composable Audiences Available to All Customers

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Rokt mParticle Makes Match Boost and Composable Audiences Available to All Customers

The leading real-time customer data platform expands access to its highest-impact capabilities, enabling marketing teams to validate performance before expanding their investment

Rokt mParticle, the leading hybrid customer data platform (CDP) for global enterprises, announced it is broadening access to Match Boost and Composable Audiences for all customers. Marketing teams can now activate both capabilities in live campaigns, measure results across full performance cycles, and determine the right level of investment based on outcomes in their own environment.

The move directly addresses a challenge Rokt mParticle hears consistently from enterprise marketing teams: as signal loss makes performance harder to sustain and executive teams demand measurable return from every incremental dollar, the standard SaaS model continues to ask customers to expand commitment before they’ve had the chance to validate impact. Rokt mParticle is changing that sequencing — making high-impact capabilities accessible within everyday workflows, with clear guardrails in place of artificial trial deadlines.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Haley Trost, Group Product Marketing Manager @ Braze

“Adoption should follow evidence, not precede it,” said Jillian Burnett, Senior Vice President, Go-to-Market for Rokt mParticle. “If a capability has the potential to drive measurable impact, customers should be able to see that impact clearly — in their own environment, against their own benchmarks — before we ask them to do anything else.”

Match Boost: More Reach From First-Party Data

As signal loss continues to reduce how effectively paid platforms recognize known customers, marketers are seeing smaller addressable audiences and diminished return from their first-party data. Match Boost improves match rates to paid destinations — including Meta, Google, Pinterest, Reddit, and Rokt — without requiring teams to redesign their existing setup. By enriching first-party audiences with additional identifiers and attributes from trusted third-party sources at the point of activation, it increases the addressable portion of activated audiences and supports stronger conversion rates and ROAS. Enriched data is used only for activation and does not persist in mParticle or downstream platforms. Many customers are already seeing match rates more than double.

Marketing Technology News: Cross-Department Collaboration with Marketing Workflow Automation: Enhancing Alignment Between Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Teams

Composable Audiences: Hybrid Audience Strategy at Enterprise Scale

Enterprise data environments are already hybrid — historical depth lives in the data warehouse, while real-time signals capture in-the-moment behavior. Composable Audiences gives marketing and data teams structured control across that environment, enabling them to define audiences directly from warehouse data, while incorporating real-time signals where responsiveness matters. Teams can apply advanced logic, leverage richer datasets, and maintain governance standards without duplicating data or restructuring existing workflows.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Elite Site Optimizer Launches Industry’s First ‘Specific Generative AI’ for Global Accessibility and AI-Search Dominance

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Elite Site Optimizer Launches Industry’s First 'Specific Generative AI' for Global Accessibility and AI-Search Dominance

ESO Logo

Elite Site Optimizer (ESO), a leader in enterprise digital governance, today announced a breakthrough expansion of its platform: Specific Generative AI modules engineered to solve the “Visibility Gap” created by AI-powered search engines. By merging Global Digital Accessibility Compliance with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), ESO is the first platform to help brands comply with the law and be found by AI.

As the European Accessibility Act and WCAG 2.2 standards move into strict enforcement, and AI “Answer Engines” like Perplexity and Google Gemini reduce traditional web traffic, enterprises face a dual crisis: legal liability and declining visibility. ESO’s new AI-native ecosystem solves both.

The launch of our generative remediation engine represents a paradigm shift in the digital transformation market”

— Muthukrishnan Govindaraj

Turning Accessibility into a Competitive Advantage: ESO’s Automated Remediation Engine uses domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) to not only identify accessibility barriers but also to actively generate code fixes.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

Autonomous Metadata: Instantly generates precise Alt-Text and ARIA mappings.

Developer Efficiency: Reduces manual remediation time by up to 70% for supported codebases.

Dominating the Post-Search Era – AEO & GEO: While traditional SEO focuses on rankings, ESO’s new GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) suite focuses on Citations.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Structures content to become the “Primary Source” for AI voice assistants and zero-click snippets.

GEO Intelligence: Audits how LLMs perceive a brand, ensuring company data is accurately synthesized and cited in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Marketing Technology News: Is the Traditional CDP Already Out of Date?

“We are moving from an era of ‘Searching’ to an era of ‘Answering’,” said Muthukrishnan Govindaraj, Founder and CEO of Elite Site Optimizer. “By merging accessibility with AEO and GEO, we aren’t just helping companies stay compliant; we are ensuring they remain relevant in a digital world where AI is the primary gatekeeper of information.”

This launch marks ESO’s transition from a standard SEO tool to a Digital Trust & AI-Readiness Platform. With a flexible RaaS (Results-as-a-Service) model, ESO offers top-level “Executive Compliance Intelligence,” turning technical audits into clear measures of risk reduction.

Scalefusion Introduces Programmable Custom Properties

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Scalefusion Introduces Programmable Custom Properties

ProMobi Technologies announced that Scalefusion, its leading unified endpoint management solution, has introduced Programmable Custom Properties (PCP).  IT teams can now automate custom property updates through script execution on Windows, macOS, and Linux devices.

Custom properties are data fields IT teams use to track specific device and user fields, like which department a device belongs to, what location it’s in, or whether it passed a compliance check. These labels help teams filter devices, pull reports, and run automated workflows. However, maintaining these properties has traditionally required manual updates, creating inefficiencies and potential errors when managing hundreds or thousands of devices.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Lee McCance, Chief Product Officer @ Adverity

Programmable Custom Properties solves this challenge by allowing scripts to update these fields automatically during execution. For example, a script that checks device encryption can now automatically tag unencrypted devices, eliminating the need for manual follow-up. The same capability applies to software audits, performance checks, or other script-based operations. Custom properties remain accurate, and IT teams can configure script-managed fields to prevent accidental modifications. All script-triggered changes are logged, providing complete audit visibility.

“IT teams depend on custom properties to label their devices and users with information like asset ID, project assignment. But keeping those properties up to date has always required manual effort, even when scripts are already discovering that information. We built Programmable Custom Properties to close that gap. Scripts can now update the properties they reference, so the data stays accurate without IT teams having to do it manually”, said Sriram Kakarala, Chief Product Officer at Scalefusion.

Marketing Technology News: What is a Full Stack Marketer; What MarTech Matters Most to Full Stack Marketers?

Programmable Custom Properties enhances Scalefusion’s scripting capabilities by allowing scripts to continuously update the data IT teams depend on. Ensuring compliance, automation, and reporting workflows are now driven by accurate, real-time information.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Adtech Faces Rising Privacy Pressures Despite Cookie U-Turn

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Adtech Faces Rising Privacy Pressures Despite Cookie U-Turn

Google’s reversal on third-party cookie deprecation might look like breathing room for adtech. In reality, it only delays one element of a much larger structural shift, one that reflects changes in consumer trust, corporate transparency, and government oversight.

This year alone, European regulators have fined Google and Meta hundreds of millions of dollars for data compliance violations and unlawful ad targeting. Globally, regulators are sharpening their focus on opaque ad practices, particularly around how consumer information and identifiers are collected and shared. In the United States, state-level privacy laws are multiplying, each with its own requirements for consent and data handling.

For more precise and relevant campaigns, the adtech industry must adapt their data practices to be based on connection and traffic signals. IP intelligence is key to this adaptation: improving conversion, enabling compliance, and defending against invalid or malicious traffic.

From Cookies to Context

Third-party cookies have long been the industry’s default for campaign delivery, but their decline is irreversible. Safari and Firefox already block them by default, and Google has announced, and delayed, their deprecation in Chrome multiple times since 2020. Each delay may reduce immediate headaches, but it only postpones the inevitable.

Advertisers and platforms now face a dual challenge:

  • Legacy dependency:

Maintaining systems built around third-party cookies and device identifiers.

  • Regulatory expectation:

Proving they can operate transparently, respect user privacy, and comply with fast-changing laws.

That tension is only intensifying. The industry can’t lean back on Chrome’s shifting timeline. Those who continue to depend on third-party cookies risk heavy penalties, reputational damage, and losing advertiser trust, while competitors future-proof their data strategies.

Signal-Driven Privacy and Performance

Privacy and performance are both strengthened by the same foundation: reliable, verifiable signals. Poor-quality signals, whether from unverified traffic sources, mismatched regional access, or anomalous network activity, erode both compliance and ROI.

Ad fraud illustrates these risks vividly, costing marketers more than $84 billion in 2023, with forecasts suggesting it could double by 2028. Fraud not only drains budgets, but also distorts the very performance metrics advertisers rely on. Network and traffic-based indicators are now essential. Signals such as:

  • Unusual routing paths that suggest proxy or VPN masking
  • Suspicious traffic spikes that resemble bot activity
  • Regionally inconsistent access patterns that raise compliance flags

All serve dual purposes. They help advertisers protect spend by filtering out fraud, and they help platforms demonstrate to regulators that campaigns are built on transparent, accountable practices.

The IP Address as an Anchor Signal

Amid shrinking identifiers and rising oversight, one signal continues to provide reliability: the IP address. It reflects a consistent connection level signal, not a personal identifier, and adds useful context for decision making.

When enriched and verified, IP intelligence can provide:

  • Geolocation:

Enabling region-appropriate content and ensuring campaigns comply with jurisdictional rules.

  • Privacy detection:

Identifying when traffic is routed through VPNs, proxies, or compromised networks that may mask fraud.

  • Network details:

Distinguishing between traffic from mobile carriers, hosting providers, or shared access points such as airplanes and airports.

Accurate and regularly refreshed IP intelligence helps platforms meet regulatory expectations for transparency while delivering positive outcomes. And migrating to an IP intelligence provider doesn’t have to necessitate months of work. We recently oversaw a large enterprise migration that took six weeks from evolution to deployed-in-production.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Practical Steps for Adtech Leaders

Adtech firms navigating this environment can take concrete actions to mitigate fraud, maintain compliance, and improve performance:

Audit existing signals for compliance risk.

Many platforms still rely on data sources of varying quality. Auditing where these signals come from, and how they’re used, is the first step toward avoiding future regulatory challenges.

Use verifiable, privacy-resilient signals.

Focus on obtaining signals that can be independently validated, refreshed regularly, and explained clearly to regulators and advertisers alike.

Treat fraud prevention as a compliance function.

Invalid traffic doesn’t just waste budgets; it undermines transparency. Regulators and advertisers increasingly expect proof that campaigns aren’t built on manipulated or misused data.

Communicate transparency to advertisers.

In an environment of mistrust, platforms that can show how they verify signals will earn greater advertiser confidence and stand out from competitors.

Adhere to region-specific requirements.

From GDPR in Europe to CPRA in California and new laws emerging in Asia and South America, compliance can no longer be addressed with one blanket policy. Data handling and targeting strategies must account for regional rules, often at the IP-geolocation level.

Don’t wait for Google’s timeline.

Chrome may have delayed cookie deprecation again, but Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default, and regulators are moving fast. Waiting for Google’s final switch-off risks falling behind competitors who are already adapting.

The New Adtech Landscape

The adtech companies that succeed in this new landscape will be those that embrace contextual, verifiable signals drawn from signal-rich IP data. These signals give advertisers confidence that campaigns are regionally relevant, fraud-resilient, and compliant with the evolving rules that govern today’s markets.

The ground beneath the industry is shifting fast. Cookies may linger, but the forces reshaping digital advertising are already here.

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