CBS And Nielsen Collaborate To Advance Dynamic Ad Insertion In Live Broadcasts
CBS and Nielsen Will Be Able to Make the Idea of Delivering a Complete DAI Platform into a Reality
CBS and Nielsen announced that they are working on a collaboration that will deliver Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) in live linear national broadcast television, helping to actualize and progress addressable advertising. Powered by Nielsen Gracenote ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), the solution will use frame-accurate video recognition technology for precise ad detection and content insertion in live TV.
The collaboration is the next step for CBS, who led the marketplace in delivery of addressable advertising to millions of users across CBS Interactive’s portfolio of digital properties including OTT brands; CBSN, the 24/7 digital news network, CBS Sports HQ, the 24-hour streaming sports news network; and CBS All Access, CBS’ digital subscription video-on-demand and live streaming service.
“CBS has been at the forefront of using Nielsen data and measurement to prove the value of television, and now we are working on taking the next step with Nielsen to go beyond age and gender by bringing targeted dynamic ad insertion to national live TV inventory,” said Joann Ross, President and Chief Advertising Revenue Officer, CBS Corporation. “This will create a more relevant ad experience for our viewers and better outcomes for our clients.”
Gracenote ACR is integrated into millions of smart TVs from major manufacturers and uses anonymized information from smart TVs with advanced personalization features. By leveraging Gracenote ACR products, along with Nielsen’s industry-leading solutions, CBS and Nielsen will be able to make the idea of delivering a complete DAI platform into a reality. This will give CBS an ability to offer impressions segmented by behavioral attributes, beyond age and gender, within a live national television program to advertisers, allowing them to reach the appropriate segments of households with the most relevant ad creative.
“As TV becomes more digitally delivered, Nielsen is on the forefront of innovation in bringing our clients unique capabilities that will continue to drive the value of advertising on television,” said Peter Bradbury, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, National Client Solutions, Nielsen. “Nielsen, through its acquisition of Gracenote, will leverage patented technology to replace linear ad spots on individual Smart TV sets to offer more advanced advertising capabilities to brands.”
Ross continued: “Advertisers want to reach a precise audience, viewers want relevant advertising, and CBS wants to make the best use of every ad impression. This initiative will deliver for everyone – a true win-win-win.”
PacketZoom Launches 'Mobile Connect', a Real-Time Multiplayer Mobile Networking Solution
PacketZoom Mobile Connect Improves Multiplayer Communication, Offers Faster and More Reliable Player Connectivity; Eliminates Game Developer Need to Deploy Resources In-House
PacketZoom has announced the launch of Mobile Connect, a real-time multiplayer networking solution as part of its end-to-end Mobile Networking Platform. With its latest launch, the company is re-defining mobile application performance via in-app mobile networking technology. Mobile Connect is currently in soft launch and is scheduled to be publicly available in Q3, 2018.
At the time of this announcement, Tim Wilson, former Chief Technology Officer of Glu Mobile and PacketZoom advisor, said, “In recent years multiplayer mobile games have proven very popular and lucrative, but the effort required to build a high performance, reliable networking layer for multiplayer games represents a significant undertaking for game developers.”
Tim added, “I’ve experienced the void in the gaming space firsthand. PacketZoom fills this void via a global UDP-based cloud solution that is uniquely positioned to offer an alternative, affordable service to deliver best-in-class performance and reduce complexity and operational cost for multiplayer game developers while accelerating their title’s time to market.”
With mobile games now generating more than half of the gaming industry revenues and real-time multiplayer games topping the download charts, game developers are expected to deliver high-quality experiences for gamers.
To achieve that, mobile game developers often need to invest in building and operating expensive in-house solution to enable real-time communication capabilities between all players in order to allow quick player discovery, stats and position sync-up.
Mobile Connect was custom-built to handle the unique requirements of multiplayer apps and eliminate the need for in-house infrastructure by offering a public cloud solution. It ensures instantaneous, stable and secure connectivity, higher quality of service (QoS) and session continuity, without the need to deploy servers or invest in additional infrastructure.
Multiplayer game developers today typically need to choose between open source protocol or licensed code from game engines. Existing public cloud options are limited in geography and custom development could end up being a time sink. In many cases, the need to operate their own messaging server distracts game developers from focusing on game development and they end up being late to market. PacketZoom Mobile Connect is designed to solve this problem.
“We decided to add a multiplayer networking layer in response to a continuous demand from our existing customers and key partners who haven’t found existing solutions to be efficient,” said Chetan Ahuja, PacketZoom’s CTO.
Chetan added, “As mobile networking experts, we are honored to solve the biggest problem in mobile game networking to enable the exceptional multiplayer experience, even in developing countries where latency requirements are impossible to meet with the existing infrastructure.”
While Mobile Connect was originally designed for multiplayer mobile games, other verticals such as rideshare applications have also shown interest in leveraging the solution for real-time multiplayer communication.
Currently, PacketZoom redefines mobile performance via in-app networking technology. Designed specifically for native mobile apps, PacketZoom’s mobile platform empowers mobile app developers to optimize mobile app performance in real-time.
In the report, Gartner evaluated 13 CRM vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, “The best applications have tools for both agents and customers. To be included here, the vendors have to have a clear point of view on how to escalate customer support from digital self-service to human agents and back again, while retaining the context of the interaction for reporting and future customer engagements.”
Pega’s end-to-end suite of customer engagement applications for marketing, sales, and customer service is powered by Pega Customer Decision Hub, its real-time artificial intelligence (AI) engine. Built on Pega Platform, the industry-leading application development platform, Pega’s CRM solutions enable clients to anticipate customers’ changing needs and provide personalized, AI-driven recommendations throughout the customer journey.
This recognition builds on Pega’s recent analyst recognitions. Pega was named a Visionary in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs (2) and received the highest scores in two use cases in Gartner’s December 2017 Critical Capabilities for the CRM Customer Engagement Center report (3). Pega was also named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q2 2017 (4) report.
Kerim Akgonul
“As customers continue to follow nonlinear journeys, the brands they interact with need tools to deliver consistent experiences that provide value at all times, on all channels,” said Kerim Akgonul, senior vice president, product, Pegasystems. “At Pega, we are enabling clients with an AI-powered omnichannel approach to customer engagement, coupled with end-to-end robotic automation to deliver meaningful interactions in real time. We believe this latest recognition from Gartner further reinforces Pega’s continued leadership in empowering the world’s top organizations to optimize customer engagement.”
H2 and Google for Entrepreneurs Decide to Connect and Support Startups across the Globe
H2, the premier global leadership network for the tech industry, and Google for Entrepreneurs announced a new global partnership. This partnership will bring together the largest worldwide resources and networks for both H2 and Google for Entrepreneurs. This move will significantly help in actively supporting leading technology leaders, in innovation centers on a global scale.
Nayan Patel, founder & CEO of H2 said, “H2’s mission and programs center on the core themes of connections, learning, and support. Our global partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs amplifies these themes and builds valuable connectivity for H2 to the best of Google’s resources around the world. We are excited to be partnering closely across our programs to continue scaling H2’s reach and impact on a global level.”
Genna McKeel, Head of Global Partnerships at Google for Entrepreneurs said, “At Google, we know that innovation is thriving across the world and not just in Silicon Valley. H2 shares this global mindset and has shown how bringing industry leaders together in innovation centers globally can have a real impact. We’re excited to welcome H2 into the Google for Entrepreneurs partner network and to work together to build connections between entrepreneurs and experienced leaders in startup communities across the globe.”
H2, also announced the launch of H2 Innovate which is a program for startups rising in large global markets—along with the partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs and other selected leading global partners. The H2 Innovate program offers participating companies pointed access to domain experts and industry leaders from H2’s member community and connections to H2’s partner network as well. The participating launch partners for H2 Innovate include Silicon Valley Bank, Google for Entrepreneurs, Cooley, Accel Partners, White Star Capital, Golden Gate Ventures, Kalaari Capital, GSF Accelerator, Endeavor, 500 Startups, Naspers Ventures, Seedcamp, and SOSV. The participating startups across Latin America, Asia and Europe initially included Fleksy, IDwall, YEAY, and DataStreamX.
Olivier Plante, CEO of Fleksy said, “Our early participation in H2 Innovate has led to a number of valuable connections and targeted insights for our business. We’re excited to continue our engagement in the program through its launch and as we continue scaling up over the period ahead.”
H2 will soon be hosting its sixth annual Global Summit which invites executives, investors, and entrepreneurs from various leading digital companies and industrial organizations to meet at one of the greatest innovation hubs around the world. The summit is designed on an invite-only, senior-level event- but it offers all participants a unique medium of engaging in dynamic discussions covering industry insights and tech trends from around the globe.
H2’s global community members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, PopXO, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox, People Group, Property Guru, Slack, Spotify, Ubimo, Wego among others across leading global innovation centers. Through its global networking content and programs, H2 creates remarkable opportunities for knowledge in exchange for support of its mission.
Former Salesforce EVP & First CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra Joins Sprinklr as COO
Vivek Kundra to Position SaaS Company for Next Stage of Global Growth as it Continues to Define Customer Experience Management Category
Sprinklr, the world’s leading Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform, announced the appointment of Vivek Kundra as Chief Operating Officer. As former Executive Vice President of Salesforce and the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, Kundra has a track record of leadership and operational excellence that will support Sprinklr’s growth and mission to help enterprise brands create more human experiences at scale across social and digital channels.
As EVP at Salesforce, Kundra led growth and go-to-market strategies for key global verticals such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Auto, Communications, and the Public Sector, by creating an ecosystem of partners and launching new apps to solve industry-specific challenges. He also launched a new Government Cloud, opening up new markets and accelerating growth in the US, EMEA, and APAC.
Before that, Kundra served as the first CIO for the U.S. government under President Obama. In that capacity, he was responsible for managing $80 billion in annual technology spending, saved $3 billion in taxpayer dollars while moving the government to the cloud, and strengthened the cybersecurity posture of the nation while making it more open, transparent, and participatory.
Over the past few quarters, Sprinklr, which was last valued 2+ years ago at more than $1.8 billion, has moved aggressively to scale a global business that already has 1400+ employees and 1200+ of the world’s most valuable enterprise brands (e.g. Nike, McDonald’s, Microsoft) as customers:
Expanded from Social Media to Customer Experience Management: Announced a major expansion of the Sprinklr Experience Cloud platform, powered by new AI capabilities, with clouds for each major customer-facing department — marketing, advertising, research, commerce, and care — as well as social.
Added Major Talent & Experience to C-Suite: Hired former Microsoft CMO Grad Conn as CXMO, Luca Lazzaron as its first CRO, Diane Adams as Chief Talent & Culture Officer, and welcomed John Chambers, former Executive Chairman & CEO of Cisco, to Sprinklr’s Board of Directors.
Strengthened Partner Ecosystem: Named Microsoft’s U.S. ISV of the Year and SAP Hybris Partner of the Year, unveiled first-of-its-kind Viber and Reddit integrations, became one of the first companies to join Twitter’s Official Partner Program, and built stronger LINE, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest partnerships to meet the growing demand for a unified CXM platform.
Scaled for Success: Expanded into several new countries around the world (e.g. Netherlands, Australia), continued to drive meaningful business results for some of the world’s largest brands (e.g. Allstate, Lenovo, SAP, Shell, Sonos), continued to increase average deal size, and signed the largest eight-figure deal in Sprinklr’s history.
“I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my career to learn from amazing leaders running some of the largest companies and governments in the world. All of them share one goal: to build enduring relationships that create value for every one of their constituents,” said Kundra, adding, “The social revolution has created an unprecedented disruption for these organizations, but when they overcome it, the results are transformational — for them, and for their customers. I couldn’t be more excited to bring what I’ve learned to the only company that was built from the ground up to solve this problem, and to do so at massive, global scale.”
“There are only a handful of execs in the world that have scaled SaaS companies at the level we aspire to, and even fewer who understand at their core, as we do, that the ability to create happy customers — listening to, engaging, and reaching them across dozens of digital channels — is the most strategic investment for the modern enterprise. To find both in one person is incredibly rare,” said Ragy Thomas, CEO & Founder, Sprinklr. “With a foundation in social, Sprinklr was purpose-built to be the defining enterprise software company for CXM, and with Vivek in our corner, we’re going to be relentless in our pursuit of that vision, executing with more momentum than ever.”
Key Takeaways from the SiriusDecisions Summit 2018
According to SiriusDecisions’ research, 80 percent of B2B buyers rate customer experience with the brand – either their own or that reported by peers – as the most significant driver of the purchase decision
It was my great pleasure to be part of the SaleScout Data Solutions presence at SiriusDecisions Summit (#SDSummit) this year. It’s really exhilarating to experience 3,000-plus people gathered together with a common goal to learn about current best practices and innovations in B2B sales and marketing. For myself, after spending the past two decades in consumer marketing and sales, I couldn’t help but view the keynotes and sessions through B2C-colored glasses. Along these lines, here are a few observations from the show.
Brand Experience = Customer Experience
A brief power outage didn’t stop Lisa Nakano and Julie Ogilvie from lighting up the stage with an inspiring keynote that explained why branding, customer engagement, and employee engagement need to be viewed holistically to deliver the best experience for customers – and, yes, customer experience does matter to business buyers.
According to SiriusDecisions’ research, 80 percent of B2B buyers rate customer experience with the brand – either their own or that reported by peers – as the most significant driver of the purchase decision. As Lisa Nakano said, “brand experience and customer experience are two sides of the same coin. B2C brands have known this for many years, so it’s great to hear that the same realization is taking place in the B2B realm.”
Storytelling Matters
The idea of telling a story to capture consumer interest and create brand loyalty has been part of B2C marketing for a while now. So it was interesting to hear keynote speaker Molly Bloom discuss branding through storytelling for a B2B crowd. Bloom’s story was recently told in the movie “Molly’s Game,” which chronicles how she ended up creating and operating the largest, most exclusive, private poker games in the world.
Bloom’s advice to SD Summit attendees was to avoid direct sales pitches and instead, sell through telling a story. A good product combined with an engaging story will spark interest and lead prospects to your brand – and will set you apart from the competition, as most B2B brands haven’t yet implemented this approach.
From a sales perspective, it’s also important to have a story to tell when speaking with leads. Knowing details about what is happening with a prospect (they’re new to the company) or with the company itself (it just received a round of funding) helps salespeople start a meaningful conversation with the prospect, instead of merely reciting a list of products.
Technology by Itself Is Not Enough
Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, the marketing technology landscape is unbelievably varied and complex – 6,800 solutions from 6,400 providers at last count. It’s not hard to imagine why 85 percent of SD Summit attendees either don’t have a basic tech stack or attended the show to grow their tech stack. There is a huge demand for technology that gives B2B marketing and sales teams an edge.
But, even with the perfect tech stack and a huge spend on Artificial Intelligence to nurture leads through the pipeline, it may not be enough. Even with all that technology, if you’re not responding to the right signals, nurturing the right individuals in the right buying group, and taking the right action, nothing will be effective. Sales intelligence and data quality are still key to sales success.
In their keynote, Erin Bohlin and Laura Cross presented the new SiriusDecisions Buyer Treatment Plan – a three-pronged model for improving lead nurture programs by adapting buyer interactions according to signal, response, and action. Case in point, Snowflake – a cloud-based data-warehousing company – experienced 300 percent net new growth and 72 percent account acceleration by developing a robust tech stack to listen to buying signals at the account, group and individual levels to determine the best response and next best action.
As Peter, one of the visitors to the SaleScout booth, observed, “Everyone in this space is using a fire hose and we’ve got to get more targeted.”
Bill Walker talks about his role in The Unison Home Ownership Investors, and their sales and marketing approaches.
Know My Team
Tell us about your role at Unison Home Ownership Investors and how you got here.
As the Chief Revenue Officer at Unison Home Ownership Investors, I am responsible for cultivating and building out new and existing marketing channels and supporting the onboarding and servicing of new clients.
Prior to joining Unison, I was Vice President of Customer Experience at Prosper Marketplace where I had the opportunity to grow origination volumes from $10 million/month to $400 million/month along with the overall company portfolio to $4.5 billion. I have over 20 years of marketing and operations experience in the financial services space and have held executive roles at Barclaycard and MBNA (acquired by Bank of America).
As a real estate investor, I see a tremendous need for Unison’s products as being completely new to residential real estate finance and as an entrepreneur, at heart, I relished the opportunity to build from a nearly blank slate from a customer acquisition and operations standpoint. Unison had the need to reinvent the customer experience along with affording me the opportunity to build new acquisition channels, improve existing direct response channels, sales operations and rapidly grow the business.
As a CRO in a heavily tech-loaded ecosystem, what draws you to explore more about martech?
Unison has an incredibly diverse pool of client personas, from the first-time Millennial homebuyer to the retiree needing some extra cash to pay for life’s expenses. This kind of diversity calls for an omnichannel approach to engage with clients wherever and however they shop. To create a seamless and responsive customer experience, understanding and fully accounting for the end-user and their requirements is pivotal in implementing new marketing tools and technology to ultimately grow the business.
How tech-savvy is your marketing, sales and branding teams? How do you rate them on a scale of 1-10?
Our teams utilize a number of “off-the-shelf” technology tools (Encompass, Salesforce, Five9, etc.), custom data integrations (bureau, income validation tools, proprietary investment management database) and a custom-built user experience. Our teams are fairly tech-savvy, but there will always be challenges and opportunities to learn. Bringing together the diversity, breadth, and scope of solutions to create a seamless and responsive experience is a consistent challenge for multiple teams within our organization to navigate.
Unison Office
How do you think young sales professionals should train themselves to master martech skills?
When approaching marketing technology, today’s young sales and marketing professionals need to learn to —
Be ever-more concise in a marketplace with numerous options and distractions coupled with shrinking attention spans
Implement true enterprise-wide Voice of the Customer (VoC) as consumer expectations get higher by the day
Integrate data into the experience to remove friction, avoiding the temptation of solving problems by throwing FTEs (Full Time Equivalent) at processes that require technology to scale properly
How do you collaborate with your CMO and CTO to manage long marketing and sales campaigns?
My team approaches marketing and sales campaigns by finding new ways to differentiate the direct response, campaign-driven demand generation, the onboarding experience and conversion optimization from brand-building and the brand voice — though there is clearly a synergy among those efforts. Brand awareness and the brand voice are not necessarily activities that fall under “top of the funnel” demand generation.
However, when done well, they will significantly enhance the effectiveness of direct response campaign efforts. Brand activities provide air cover for everything else we do. We continue to spend a lot of time on R&D for new channels, messaging and product refinements, in addition to partnerships and other initiatives that can fuel the next stages of growth.
Given the number of technology resource asks around our fast-growing organization, prioritization conversations require broad representation. This extends beyond the CMO and CTO and includes folks from operations, legal and compliance, marketing, engineering and collaboration across the technology organization. Within the technology organization, we have a Head of Product and a Head of Engineering, both crossing the divide between marketing and technology. They happen to speak both languages, which is great for us.
B2B Marketing Strategy
What is your “Voice of the Customer” program?
The VoC program leverages customer feedback, which is key to understanding if we are delivering a consistent experience that meets our customers’ expectations. A robust VoC program needs to leverage data sources that are as diverse as the channels being used to market, including email surveys, phone surveys, customer listening, agent focus groups, along with the dynamic feedback and conversion analysis that accompanies rigorous A/B testing at key points in the customer onboarding funnel. This information is used to identify and prioritize technology, operations, and product enhancements.
How do you identify the ‘generational gap’ among the marketing technologies? What next-gen technologies are you keenly following?
The generational gap is not necessarily with marketing technologies, but with the different client personas and how businesses reach each of these audiences. It is important to meet our customers where they are and using the communication channels they are most comfortable with.
Unison’s client personas are extraordinarily diverse, ranging from the first-time Millennial home buyer to the move-up homebuyer to the retiree needing a reverse mortgage. A diversity of this nature requires alignment with the types of marketing and communication technologies that each of these audiences expects and is comfortable using.
Unison Team
We created a truly omnichannel approach that engages our clients wherever and however they shop, whether it be online, by phone or even by paper-file processing. We are using Salesforce and Five9, along with a number of plugins for both; including chat, lead-scoring, credit bureau APIs and proprietary technologies to ensure that we can meet our clients’ needs.
Are modern marketing technologies pushing the boundaries of present-day brand engagement and customer experience? How often do you measure the performance of your marketing analytics and sales reporting?
Modern marketing technologies are improving brand engagement and helping to optimize the customer experience. We’re a program that doesn’t look like the programs that our clients may be familiar with – because we are not debt. For example, they know what a mortgage is, they know what a credit card is but they don’t know what an equity investment is or how it works. They don’t realize how easy it can be to enter into a home-ownership investment with us or all the ways that we can help them enjoy a better ownership experience with significantly increased financial flexibility.
As a result, we want our customers to be completely educated on how we’re different than the financing options they’ve considered or used in the past. We want that information to be readily available. We want to give them as much information as they need, and we want to make sure they understand it before entering into a partnership with Unison. At the same time, we don’t want to be heavy-handed and have people jump through a lot of unnecessary hoops between engaging with us and getting to the finish line.
Customer experience creates an important feedback loop for everything else that we do in terms of demand generation, onboarding and managing the customer relationship after they originate. Understanding our customers helps us determine how we can give them the information they want, via the channels they want, when they want it and the amount that they want it in — all without beating them to death with it or making it hard to do business with us.
We measure the performance of our marketing programs and success by looking at response rates, CAC, Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and a variety of other metrics depending upon the marketing channel. From a growth standpoint, we’ve doubled each quarter, quarter over quarter, throughout 2017 and the expectation is we’ll grow another 6x in 2018. Unison’s Voice of the Customer program is an integral part of the feedback loop by which we measure our success.
What are the dynamic elements driving your B2B customer engagement model? How do you execute Engagement Economy vision, Strategy, Product and Corporate development at Unison Home Ownership Investors?
Unison HomeBuyer, and to a lesser extent, Unison HomeOwner, have a number of B2B audiences who are part of the residential real estate finance ecosystem and have varying motivations to engage with us.
We are continually evaluating how we can add value to loan officers, real estate agents, title companies and others who play a key role in closing transactions. Each party in a successful transaction has different motivations, pain points and needs when it comes to growing their business and we are continually testing and seeking feedback as to how Unison can be a resource in helping our business partners grow alongside us.
Testing can run the gamut from providing useful content, communication channels and even new partnerships we can pursue to help our existing partners offer a better experience for their customers.
What are the tools and strategies you use to create a seamless customer experience at Unison Home Ownership Investors? Could you provide us a sneak peek into your MarTech acceleration strategies?
Before implementing tools and creating content, we had to articulate a clear path for the evolution of the online experience, what each iterative chunk of work would be and how much further the online experience would go. There was an incredible buy-in and excitement for the project, which enabled me to go out to a few trusted agency partners and build a low-touch skeleton site that served as a reasonable landing place for people responding to our digital and DM efforts — without committing millions of dollars and tons of internal resources to the effort.
We put a proof of concept out there, showed the wins, optimized, showed more wins, to the point where roughly halfway through the year, it was obvious that it was working — that it was providing the feedback loop we hoped for. From there, we were able to use more and more internal company resources to build out the content, web experience and marketing channels.
With the overall onboarding experience for our customers significantly improved, we are now spending a lot of time developing tools and content for potential Unison HomeBuyer customers who are not yet under contract to purchase a home. The content needs for this audience are more challenging to discern as they could be anywhere from two days to two years from closing their transaction and we want to provide quality information to help make the home buying process easier, however far along they may be.
Which types of content (web and social) you create in a day, week, month, and a quarter?
Out of all marketing collateral, including the whitepaper, brochures, e-book, playbook, case studies, webinar, research reports, and infographics, which resonates the most with your customers?
Given that the category of homeownership investments did not exist previously, there is a heightened need to provide easy-to-access resources that speak to our credibility, ease of use and fairness. The types of content we have found to resonate the most with our customers include top-tier media coverage, testimonials, product evaluations and respected lender partnerships.
From an industry perspective, we have had a ton of interest in our – now annual – Home Affordability Report, homebuying surveys along with a whitepaper looking at the relationship between inflation and rapidly escalating home prices.
Customer Success and Technology Insights
From a tactical standpoint, how often does your organization revisit the automation stack?
It is an all-encompassing activity to implement significant changes to the automation stack and should not be taken lightly, however, near-continuous evaluation of current tools versus alternatives is imperative. As we speak, we are just concluding implementation of Marketo and are refining the testing agenda for the next several months.
How does the technology involved impact your customer building/partnership model?
We have APIs that access our proprietary investment management database along with the credit bureaus to determine if, based on the address entered, we can make an investment. This allows us to get back to the consumer with more solid, actionable information. We’re either generation five or six of our digital storefront and continue to streamline the experience and add new functionalities.
We are continually seeking feedback from customers, partners and customer contact personnel to drive change and have prioritized adding automation to key portions of our underwriting process this year. We want to use external data sources, wherever possible, to validate prospective clients’ information and make it less cumbersome for them to provide needed documents.
How do you see the technology you use impact the customer acquisition and success rate?
Our elongated sales cycle consist of 12 to 15+ touchpoints and requires us to understand all channels and resources our clients are using to come to a buying decision. The technologies we use, including Google Analytics, HEAP, VoC (Voice of the Customer) and a number of other web analytics tools help us gain a more in-depth understanding of our clients’ journey to ensure that we are providing as much information as needed, when it is needed, to help improve conversion from initial inquiry to Unison customer.
Do you see sales and marketing technologies unifying or evolving together to deliver higher ROI?
The trend of technology and experience integration continues to accelerate as both the customer and the marketer expect all systems/tools to have a complete picture of the customer journey. This joint evolution offers companies the opportunity to continually deliver an experience that is customized to the nuance of each customer’s unique situation. The challenge that marketers need to meet is providing the individualized experience that today’s consumers expect and the reward for meeting this expectation is increased conversion and a better ROI.
What is that one piece of advice you received that you would like to pass on to the MarTech industry?
Good news from your customers feel better, but a bad news makes you better.
Thank You, Bill, for answering all our questions. We hope to see you again at MTS, soon.
Digital Experience Intelligence Platform Selected for Its Innovation, Impact and Intrigue
Decibel, the leader in digital experience intelligence innovation for enterprise businesses, announced that it has been included on the list of Cool Vendors in Personalization report by Gartner Inc. The report evaluates interesting, new and innovative vendors in digital marketing and commerce that are making personalization a vital component of their products and services, as customer experience is core to competitive relevance.
Decibel offers marketing leaders diagnostic data and deeper insight into customer motivation to inform customer experience and optimize user experience on websites and apps. Marketers seeking to understand what content drives engagement can use Decibel’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform to evaluate elements on their page based on mouse interactions, which may occur outside of “clickable” elements, and inform strategies for personalizing the content even further. Decibel’s platform can also be integrated with split testing, voice of the customer and personalization platforms, providing marketers with the ability to put real-time interaction data to use on their websites and apps.
“We believe our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report by Gartner validates our mission to enable brands to unlock the power of digital experience intelligence to improve business performance,” said Ben Harris, CEO and co-founder, Decibel. “The empowered consumer who interacts with a plethora of channels and devices every day requires marketers to deliver a flawless, personalized and relevant experience. Our platform arms marketers with the intelligence required to make that flawless experience happen.”
Decibel provides real-time intelligence that enables businesses to measure and improve online customer experiences – at scale. Pioneering the world’s first technology designed specifically to quantify experiences, Decibel’s Digital Experience Intelligence platform captures unique experience data, enriched by machine learning, to reveal digital body language, understand user state of mind and pinpoint problem areas on your website, web applications and native apps.
Skyword Appoints Paul Alexander, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Eastern Bank, to Its Board of Directors
Before Eastern, Paul Alexander Served as EVP and Chief Communications Officer for Liberty Mutual Insurance, a Fortune 100 Company
Skyword, the leading content marketing software and services company, recently announced that it has appointed Paul Alexander, chief marketing and communications officer of Eastern Bank, to its Board of Directors.
“Paul is an inspirational marketing leader who understands firsthand the transformation that is taking place within marketing today,” said Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword. “His perspective as a CMO will be invaluable. Paul is also passionate about businesses’ commitment to the communities they serve. His voice and guidance will be a true asset to Skyword as we continue to transform the way today’s top brands connect with their customers and prospects while also doing our part to make the world a better place.”
“I am truly excited to serve on Skyword’s board,” said Alexander. “As marketers, we all understand the need for great content that meets the needs of our customers and inspires them to act. With Skyword, marketers can build a content experience engine that differentiates their brands and drives measurable results.”
Alexander is the chief marketing and communications officer for Eastern Bank, based in Boston, Massachusetts. His goal at Eastern is to create and implement marketing and communication strategies that build bottom-line business results, brand equity, and employee engagement through the “Join Us For Good” campaign.
Before Eastern, Alexander served as EVP and chief communications officer for Liberty Mutual Insurance, a Fortune 100 company, where he held responsibility for all corporate brand marketing, advertising, communications, public relations, meeting management and event strategy, and major sports sponsorships. Previously, Alexander was vice president of global advertising and design for the Campbell Soup Company, where he led brand positioning, creative strategy, advertising development, packaging design and commercial production. Prior to Campbell’s, Alexander spent fifteen years at Procter and Gamble (P&G) as a director of advertising development and a brand manager—twelve years in Cincinnati, Ohio and three years in London, England.
Active in the community, Alexander is a member and Chair of the Trustee Board of Myrtle Baptist Church in West Newton, MA and serves on the Board of Directors of several non-profit organizations, including Feeding America (Emeritus) and The Partnership, Incorporated (Vice-Chair). He is also Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and a member of the board of advisors of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Ad Club of Boston.
Skyword customers have created and published more than one million original stories as articles, videos, images, infographics, podcasts, animations, and more on the Skyword Platform. These stories have earned Skyword customers more than two billion visits organically, and Skyword has paid its freelance creatives more than $30 million on behalf of its customers.
Technology Reveals Invaluable Insight Not Available Anywhere Else for Anyone Who Seeks Reactions to Their Content
Emotion artificial intelligence (AI) company Truthify revealed a first-of-its-kind, short-form video messaging application to help brands, marketers, media and advertising agencies, political campaigns and civic leaders gather at-scale audience feedback that is immediate, authentic and actionable. What if you could measure the subconscious emotional reaction to questions, ideas, content, products or people?
Truthify enables insight-driven decision making and planning while engaging audiences, stakeholders and buyers in a completely different way. Anyone that wants to identify emotional reactions to their message or content can use Truthify to upload or record a video and send it to an endless number of recipients. The recipient watches the video message after enabling camera permissions, and then the app uses Emotion AI to identify the recipient’s subconscious emotional reaction to the sender’s message and shares the reaction with both the sender and recipient.
Up to 90 percent of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. However, current market and qualitative research techniques for gathering customer and prospect feedback, like focus groups, surveys and polls, are not scalable and give little insight into a person’s subconscious. Typically, market research gathers feedback from a small subset of a brand’s audience, who may or may not be sharing their first (and truest) reaction. Using this as a basis when spending millions, or tens of millions, of dollars on a new advertising campaign, a consumer product launch, or to decide the next face of your political campaign, can be extremely risky. To continue to be successful, marketers will need to supplement current techniques with greater insight and scalability – both of which Truthify provides.
“Until now, brands haven’t had a means of quickly identifying the true reactions of their audience and were relegated to traditional research methods,” said Kevin Knull, CEO and Co-Founder, Truthify. “Truthify is a more modern solution to help both brands and individuals gain audience feedback that is immediate, authentic, and actionable. For the brand, knowing how a message is received by its audience before it is widespread could be very beneficial, and it could either help drive increased revenue, prevent significant losses, or avoid public relations missteps. This is honest feedback measured at 14 times per second, and it goes far beyond a ‘like’ button.”
“Truthify has the potential to disrupt the marketing and advertising industries in a really positive way,” said Joe Koufman, founder and CEO, AgencySparks, which is a matchmaker for brands and marketing agencies. “Truthify’s unique ability to enable brands to test and deliver video content quickly to ensure that it resonates emotionally with a target audience is a game-changer.”
Results within the Truthify app can be filtered by an aggregate or individual recipient comments, emotions and more. Users are also granted analytics that offers important details about their content, such as recipient demographics, the specific point at which a recipient’s emotion changed, and the device and operating system used to view the content. All of this makes it easy for brands, marketers and others to confidently make plans and decisions rooted in accurate insights that will resonate with their audience, and entice them to take an action. And, unlike current focus groups, the user can create a campaign, send it to the desired audience, and receive responses in minutes rather than weeks.
Truthify partnered with Emotion AI company Affectiva and is using their technology to evaluate recipients’ spontaneous reactions to a stimulus by tracking facial expressions and emotions. Affectiva has analyzed more than 6.5 million faces of varying gender, age and ethnicity in 87 countries, to ensure high accuracy for their technology in real-world scenarios. The seven emotions that Truthify measures include anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. With Affectiva’s Emotion AI, Truthify allows brands, marketers and others to understand complex and nuanced emotional reactions to their content in order to make better, more informed decisions.
“Emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from how we learn, to how we communicate, to what we purchase. And yet, our technology and devices today have a lot of IQ, but they’re lacking EQ, or emotion awareness,” said Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, CEO and co-founder, Affectiva. “Our mission at Affectiva is to humanize technology with Emotion AI. What makes the Truthify application exciting is that it gives anyone with a smartphone the power to use technology to better understand each other and how we emote, as well as decipher what is often lost in digital communication – emotions. Truthify allows brands, as well as consumers, to connect with those around them in a more meaningful way.”
Contentstack Levels the Playing Field for Content Editors to Join Developers in Delivering Modern Digital Experiences
Contentstack Splurges on New Features to Empower Marketers to Tackle Omnichannel, Digital Content Management
Contentstack, the digital content hub of the future and pioneer in “headless” content management system (CMS) technology announced major new enhancements to its Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform, paving the way for easier and more sophisticated content management by business users.
“API-first content management is a growing trend in the enterprise, but most commercial solutions are optimized for developers and leave behind the content editor,” said Mike Johnston, CMS industry expert and Founder of CMS Critic. “In a modern enterprise, both IT and business teams have to work together when it comes to managing digital content. With these new features, Contentstack dramatically upgrades the content editing experience for business users and places them on an equal footing with their technical peers.”
Workflow: Efficient Content Lifecycle Management
With Workflow, business content managers can streamline the process of content creation, review and deployment. Workflow significantly lowers the number of tools, review cycles and approvals required to publish content.
Publishing Rules: Define and Enforce Approval Processes
Essential to any enterprise is the ability to ensure only high-quality, approved content is disseminated via its official channels. With Publishing Rules, content can only be published if the approver(s) sign(s) off the publishing request.
Releases: Easier Deployment of Voluminous, Time-Sensitive Content
Releases eases the process of managing content associated with major business events, such as promotional campaigns or product announcements. Users can combine content elements into a single release, publish content in bulk and – crucially – accommodate last-minute content or schedule changes with ease.
Additional enhancements include Reference Editing, which streamlines the editing experience for dynamic content – such as a product catalog – and new multi-language features that deliver a powerful, developer-friendly version comparison tool into the palms of business users tracking site changes across different localizations.
“By recognizing their unique requirements and treating both constituents as equal players, Contentstack for the first time unifies traditionally divided IT and Business teams,” said Matthew Baier, COO of Contentstack. “With the advent of digital content hubs – which extend significantly beyond the scope and limitations of a traditional CMS – marketers can now engage their audiences on any digital channel with personalized content, while IT reaps the benefits of enterprise scale and security.”
Widen 2018 Connectivity Report Finds AI Key to Modern Marketing Organizations
Widen 2018 Connectivity Report Finds That Marketers Are Making Far-Reaching Decisions About Artificial Intelligence with Limited Understanding of the Technology
Widen, a leading global provider of Digital Asset Management (DAM) software, has released its second annual Connectivity Report. The Widen 2018 Connectivity Report explores how modern marketing organizations balance the power of technology with the familiarity of the human touch, and the role of connectivity in marketing operations, strategy, and business results. Widen’s team conducted and analyzed 32 phone interviews and 506 online surveys to generate the data.
Among many findings in the Widen 2018 Connectivity Report, the company discovered a significant gap between interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and understanding of that technology in marketing departments.
The 2018 Connectivity Report found that 86 percent of respondents are not using AI in marketing and creative work, yet, according to a Gallup survey, almost 85 percent of consumers already use AI tools in their personal lives. Thus, the hype for AI hasn’t translated into practical usage in marketing departments.
Interestingly, participants gave inconsistent responses about the definitions of AI and machine learning and the differences between them.
AI Remains a Sci-Fi Topic for Most Marketers!
The Widen 2018 Connectivity Report stated, “When asked what artificial intelligence means, over 50 percent of our interview participants said it either reminded them of futuristic movies and robots or that they didn’t know. People had a much better grasp on machine learning. The struggle to distinguish AI means marketers are making far-reaching decisions about concepts they don’t necessarily understand.”
The Report also covers questions about customer experience, artificial intelligence (AI), personalization, data analytics, and digital transformation. Key findings include–
76 percent of survey respondents are integrating at least two of their digital work tools.
The #1 trend among survey respondents is “personalizing the customer experience.”
93 percent of professionals surveyed feel personalization at scale is attainable, but 58 percent are unsure of how to achieve it at scale in their marketing and creative work.
“The findings on AI, personalization, and scalability are all related,” said Nina Brakel-Schutt, Brand Strategist at Widen.
Nina added, “Companies that want to use personalization on a large scale can’t do it without AI tools that study and segment customers in real time. Since marketers largely are not using AI and are unfamiliar with the technology, it makes sense that they would be uncertain about how to scale personalization.”
Using AI, Brands May Spent Over $1 Trillion to Connect to Customers and Partners
The confusion over AI likely influences the B2B ‘martech’ market. In 2017, brands may have spent over $1 trillion on marketing services to connect with consumers, partners, and team members. If marketers are looking for AI but not finding the right solutions, the first AI platforms to gain mass appeal may drive that $1 trillion significantly higher.
Currently, Widen builds high-performing software that empowers organizations to create compelling, meaningful, and measurable digital experiences. Focused on service and fueled by a global community of users, Widen has the highest customer loyalty in the digital asset management (DAM) industry.
MAZ Launches The World's First Content Logistics System: A New Category of Enterprise Software for Content Creators
MAZ Was Founded by Former Apple and Adobe Designers and Engineers
New York City-based software company, MAZ, announced that they have launched the world’s first Content Logistics System to solve the issue that all media companies and brands face of delivering their content to an ever-growing/unscalable list of social platforms, devices and operating systems. Content logistics is a brand new category of cloud-based software which addresses the problems in the part of the content supply chain that facilitates the efficient flow between the point of origin and point of consumption.
MAZ, founded by former Apple and Adobe designers and engineers, is used by brands like Bloomberg, Hearst, Condé Nast, USA Today, Outside TV, and hundreds of others.
Brands, media and news companies, TV broadcasters, and organizations, like schools and trade associations, are creating more content than ever before. Instead of needing only to push that content to a single distribution channel, they are tasked with reaching consumers across an ever-expanding multitude of devices and platforms. Most companies solve these content logistics problems by hiring developers to manually build out each distribution output one-by-one, only to find themselves needing to build again and again as new output types inevitably emerge.
Instead, they can now use MAZ, the world’s first Content Logistics System. MAZ partners can manage the processing, filtering, packaging, and shipping of their content to all major outputs, including social media like Twitter and Facebook, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, news services like Apple News, as well as the ability to create full mobile and TV apps for platforms like iOS, Android, Apple TV and Roku; all from a single system, without any code.
“Every brand today has to somehow get their content to every single distribution channel in order to reach consumers, and there are more and more popping up every year,” said MAZ CEO, Paul Canetti. “This year it’s Alexa, and next year it will be something else. Content logistics is a growing problem, and we have built a solution that truly fulfills the promise of ‘Create once, publish everywhere.’ Not only for outputs that exist today but for the ones yet to come as well.”
Unstructured data, simply stated in advertising terms, is any piece of information or behavioral signal collected in its simplest form. Once an assumption is made about the person behind that data signal and it coalesces with other signals, it then becomes segmented data or a “Data Segment.” This is a form of institutionalized stereotyping common to advertising that was born out of a technical need to generate scale and speed. Data providers, including Google and Facebook, commonly curate vague taxonomies like “auto intenders in Austin, Texas” or “high-income retail enthusiasts.”
Perhaps the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted you to download your Facebook data. Did you recognize yourself? When you take a large number of signals and group them together, you are going to get some stuff right and some stuff wrong. Segments are built on assumptions, and they can be wildly inaccurate. For marketers, that means you are wasting impressions by serving targeted ads to people who don’t actually match your criteria.
It’s true that audience segments can make workflow faster and scale more easily achieved. These advantages come with an all too common consequence repeated by digital advertising companies campaign after campaign. “We can hit your goals provided you spend enough or let the campaign run longer.”
Unstructured Data Unlocks Important Capabilities on Mobile
The rapid growth of mobile internet access via smartphones has unlocked a significant trove of new unstructured data signals. The most notable is actual GPS data verified by at least 3 of 31 GPS satellites or verified via beacons and more. According to GPS.Gov, typical GPS-enabled smartphones are accurate to within 4.9 Meters or 16 feet under an open sky. So, mobile location data can be very accurate and there is a lot of it!
Research from comScore found that mobile accounts for 69 percent of total digital media time spent, whereas desktop has fallen to less than one-third of digital media time. For advertisers, mobile is a whole new world. Mobile location data tells you where someone is and/or where they have been, which can be like a blinking red light of intent.
But many marketers today are knowingly or unknowingly executing campaigns utilizing mobile location data curated into bulk “audience segments.” This approach is in direct conflict with the potential of accurate location today to produce better campaign performance faster and with fewer impressions. In fact, a recent study found that marketers’ biggest mobile advertising challenge is opaque data: a lack of visibility into the data that was used to define their audience targeting. The fact is that while the location data can be very accurate, most mobile ad networks’ access to data is limited to small subset of mobile users. In the spirit of scale, the granularity of the data gets pooled together into a larger than desired targeting area, typically with users visiting that area over an extended period of time. Hardly precise.
Here’s what you are missing if you don’t have a means for tapping unstructured data.
The Size of Targeting Areas: Geo-Fencing for the Real World
Marketers use geo-fencing to target mobile users within a particular area. The average square footage of a quick service restaurant is between 2,000 – 4,000 square feet and rarely is the rooftop or plotline a perfect square or circle. You know your approach is segmented data if the solution being deployed required a fixed radius that is much larger than the business you intend to target. In fact, many location data companies use fixed-shape geo-fencing products that are some form of grid-based data storage and retrieval.
The world’s most precise location data isn’t very precise if it’s deployed at a size and shape that isn’t what is desired or intended. Geo-fences that use unstructured data make it possible to create custom shapes that are specific to the unique area you desire to target regardless of size. This results in more accurate targeting and fewer wasted impressions.
The Importance of Data Recency: When Matters as Much as Where
When you are targeting mobile users, there is a big difference between a prospect who was at a location a few hours ago and one who was there 27 days ago. Recency matters! Location data companies collect time-stamped data from mobile devices. When it is unstructured, marketers can customize their messaging and their bidding strategies based on the recency of when that consumer was in the targeted area. When it is structured, all that data is lumped into the same black box that forces the optimization to treat data that is three minutes old the same as data that is 60 days old.
Let’s say a car dealer wants to create a geo-fence around a competing lot. Someone who was at the location four hours ago is more likely to still be in-market for a new car than someone who visited the lot three weeks ago, so you may want to bid more aggressively for the more recent impression or perhaps serve a different creative message. Factoring recency into your strategy can deliver more cost-effective results than just targeting a broad segment of “auto intenders” who have visited nearby lots within the last 30, 60 or 90 days.
When users are on a browser, behavioral data is collected and stored against an ID, and we begin to form a pretty robust understanding of how people are spending their time online. Each mobile device also has an ID, and cross-device matching allows ad tech companies to map the behavioral data they’ve been collecting from browsers to the appropriate mobile ID. This is an oversimplified explanation, but the point is that the potential of cross-device matching allows for an injection of even more unstructured data signals to be used to refine your location-based marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you are a national financial services company with independent financial advisors all over the country. If data is unstructured, you could serve mobile in-app ads to users who are in the vicinity of your local offices and have searched for “financial planning” in the past two weeks.
Marketers value mobile and location data because it’s precise, but you lose so much granularity when you structure it. Using audience segments is the legacy way of approaching audience targeting, but it is time to evolve. Marketers need the ability to execute on the realities of the real world and to refine their strategies on mobile the same way they do in search with keyword data. Without unstructured data, you cannot realize the full promise of mobile.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud Customers Can Leverage the New Akamai Connector to Access Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions
Akamai Technologies Inc., one of the world’s largest and trusted cloud delivery platforms, announced the release of the new Akamai Connector for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud enables brands to provide personalized experiences for shoppers that span web, mobile, social and in-store. And now, as part of the world’s #1 CRM platform – Salesforce – brands can deliver completely unified experiences for customers that extend beyond commerce to include marketing, customer service and more.
The integration of the new Akamai Connector with Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows organizations to take advantage of Akamai’s Web Performance solutions. Salesforce customers can leverage the new Akamai Connector to achieve end-to-end performance and reliability, with the added benefit of the security protections inherent in Akamai’s globally distributed cloud delivery platform. By using the Akamai Connector, Salesforce customers gain a streamlined way to connect their storefronts to Akamai’s cloud security and web performance solutions, protecting sites, mobile infrastructures and API-driven requests from malicious attacks to help ensure experiences are both optimized and secured.
In today’s digital economy, consumers do not have the patience for slow performance and will quickly seek out a competitor if the site and app experience is sluggish or unreliable. Akamai Connector is designed to help eCommerce businesses eliminate the complexity and management overhead of layering an alternative Content Delivery Network (CDN) on top of the Salesforce embedded CDN. With improved performance, retailers can minimize the risk of having poorly performing sites and maximize their ability to maximize revenue by delivering the best customer experience possible across the globe.
“We believe the Salesforce and Akamai collaboration opens a wealth of possibility,” said Craig Adams, Vice President Product Management, Web Performance Business Unit, Akamai Technologies. “We’re excited to join forces with Salesforce and offer customers an end-to-end experience with the Akamai Connector to help them protect their business from security threats, unpredictable performance and delivery challenges for doing business online.”
“Creating personalized, omnichannel experiences is now more important than ever for brands,” said Mike Wolff, SVP, ISV Sales, Salesforce. “By leveraging the power of Commerce Cloud and the new Akamai Connector, customers can optimize web and mobile app performance and deliver the best experience to their customers as their business grows.”
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud empowers retailers to unify customer experiences across all points of commerce, including web, social, mobile and store. From shopping to fulfillment to customer service, the Commerce Cloud delivers 1-to-1 shopping experiences that consistently delight customers, driving increased engagement, loyalty and conversion. With embedded predictive intelligence and a robust partner ecosystem, the Commerce Cloud helps retailers deliver superior customer experiences for retailers, from planning to launch and beyond.
In This Chat, Optimove’s CEO Pini Yakuel Dove into How GDPR May Affect Marketing and Sales Technologies and the Impact on the US-Based Martech Companies
Brands love to be in the headlines, only if they are making the right kind of news and delighting their customers. What if you lose to GDPR and end up making a news headline anyways… With the biggest disruption to marketing and brand connectivity coming next week, companies are leaving no stone unturned to ensure they are on the right side of GDPR compliance.
US companies are becoming increasingly cautious about how they leverage customer data and will strive to build trust and long-lasting relationships with customers to prove their worth.
In our attempt to further strengthen a marketer’s preparedness for GDPR, we spoke to Pini Yakuel, CEO and Founder of Optimove. In this chat, Pini dove into how GDPR may affect marketing and sales technologies, its impact on the US-based martech companies and much more about marketing campaigns.
Pini Yakuel, CEO, Optimove
Exciting Opportunities and Spiraling Challenges: How do You See Both Ends of the GDPR Spectrum?
I think it (GDPR) is going to force marketers to kick ass at CRM if I would be blunt. Because today, they could get away with still batching and blasting and using those blank marketing techniques. That’s no longer going to be the case because the price of messing up is going to be very high. It’s going to be a big price to pay to lose a customer altogether and forget the customer from all your databases.
What especially makes me excited is the need for more intelligent analysis, and machinery techniques to really understand customer behavior because this is how you’re going to be more creative and start meaningful conversations with customers. This will make them want to keep their email in your list, subscribe to your website or approve a request for personal information. Why? Because they see the value.
Which Marketing and Sales Technologies Would Be Most Affected by GDPR?
Any technology that relies on leveraging customer data to make informed sales and marketing decisions will be most affected by GDPR. This ranges from the technology that populates an advertisement for a product you were just viewing to an email showcasing clothes relevant to the season in your location.
Because customers will now have to grant access to their data much more explicitly and can more easily revoke it, marketers will have to work harder to gain their trust if they want to be granted access to their data.
If brands use data to improve the customer experience and to share relevant, helpful and timely communications, they have nothing to fear from GDPR. If anything, this should serve as a signal that we should all be continuously improving in terms of catering to the customers’ wants and needs.
Why Should ‘Grey Area’ Players Fear GDPR?
To be blunt, the only marketers that should fear GDPR are the grey area players.
GDPR will essentially wipe out the ability to deploy blanket advertising to an unfiltered audience list, which is the life-blood of shady marketers. Customers will be quick to activate their ‘right to be forgotten’ if marketers are using their information poorly or incorrectly. More than ever before, marketers need to be precise, explicit and emotionally intelligent to ensure they are using customer data to actually improve the experience of that customer, or they will be cut off.
As grey area players are known for leveraging customer data only to send these often irrelevant, blanket communications, they will inevitably be caught in the act; customers will take notice and revoke access, leading to these marketers no longer being able to contact customers.
And this is how it should be!
GPPR takes what should be an industry best practice — valuable communications — and puts legislation behind it, making it so there is no longer room for communications that lack value and benefiting customers and marketers alike.
Location-based Marketing and Mobile
Location-based marketing is definitely going to create a gap between what’s possible to do in Europe versus the US in terms of mobile marketing. In terms of who’s going to be impacted, Google versus the ad networks, I think it’s the grey market players and people that sell shady email lists and shady cookie databases.
They’re not a very big part of this industry, money-wise, but they still exist. I think we’re going to see those types of vendors vanish, which is overall a good thing.
How Will GDPR Change the Stakes of “Opt-Out”?
GDPR will completely change the stakes of what it means to “opt-out” of communications from a brand. Today, if a customer opts out of communications, that simply means the brand will no longer send them emails, text messages, direct mail, etc. However, that doesn’t have any effect on their ability to store and keep your data.
When opting out within GDPR, not only will this mean you no longer receive direct communications, but the brand will be legally required to remove your data from all of their systems — a huge and important difference.
Databases, backup drives, email lists — you name it, that data will need to be erased once the consumer opts out. There will be a bigger price to pay for a brand to lose a customer altogether and forget the customer from all of their systems. Essentially, this will put more power into consumers’ hands than ever before — true and absolute control of their data.
How Will GDPR Affect US-Based Companies with No Direct Connection to EU Operations?
No matter if they have business units in Europe or not, US companies are going to have to deal with the increased sensitivity around customer data and how it is used following implementation of GDPR. From the customer perspective, they will be aware of what brands are doing in Europe (as a majority of our favorite brands are global), and if the communications under the new law are in fact providing more value, US customers will ask themselves why they are not receiving the same treatment.
All marketers are going to need to get smarter and ensure that their messages are personalized, relevant and resonant. From the business perspective, there will be a massive impact on how data is used and how its value is perceived.
US companies are becoming increasingly cautious about how they leverage customer data and will strive to build trust and long-lasting relationships with customers to prove their worth.
Apart from the Penalties Levied by the Regulators, What Would Be the Impact of Non-Compliance on Brands?
The only scenarios for noncompliance are negative ones, and penalties from regulators would just be scratching the surface of the problems and controversy a brand would face. If customers know a brand is not complying with GDPR, they are essentially not giving the people the power over their data that they deserve (and have a legal right to) and in a sense, are holding it hostage.
Who would trust that brand?
Many would not, resulting in not only a loss of customers but the loss of trust and reputation. It takes years to build trust with customers, but that trust can be lost in a moment, and possibly never recovered. All relationships, whether it is a friendship or one with your favorite brand, are grounded in trust.
By not complying, brands are telling customers they do not value their trust or perspective. In the end, these brands have a real possibility of falling in with the grey area players I discussed earlier in the minds of consumers.
How Would AI/Machine Learning Rescue Companies from GDPR? Which Companies Are Best Placed to Manage Their GDPR Strategies?
Companies need to get smart about who they are working with. Companies who are science-first and have deep knowledge of data science and artificial intelligence are best placed to manage GDPR as they have the insight and expertise other brands lack. GDPR signals a need for more intelligent analysis and machine learning techniques to deeply understand customer behavior, as many marketers clearly simply do not employ technology needed to truly get to know their customer.
For example, having AI-led customer segmentation based on hyper-specific actions is more apt to succeed than a brand using one blanket customer persona. This is how marketers are going to be more creative and start meaningful, personal conversations with customers, which will hopefully make them keep their email on your list, subscribe to your website or approve a request for personal information.
MediaCom And HYPR Launch Influencer Campaign Optimization Tool to Improve Audience Reach
The New Influencer Campaign Optimization Tool Will Enable Advertisers and Marketers to Identify and Improve the Reach and Impact of Their Social Influencer Campaigns by Eliminating Duplicate Audiences Across Influencers
In the latest announcement, MediaCom and HYPR, have announced the joint launch of a new Influencer Optimization Tool — the first of its kind in the influencer marketing industry. HYPR is a leading data-driven influencer platform. Influencer Campaign Optimization Tool was developed jointly with the aim of answering specific needs the parties recognized in the influencer marketing space.
Influencer Campaign Optimization Tool Will Eradicate Audience Overlap Across Influencers and Social Networks
Utilizing HYPR’s database of 1 billion social accounts and over 10 million influencer profiles and audience demographic data, and Mediacom’s expertise in digital campaigns and influencer marketing, the new tool enables clients to accurately curate a list of influencers with precise reach across a targeted audience demographic, and — for the first time — eradicates audience overlap across influencers and social networks.
MediaCom APAC Is the Exclusive Partner for the New HYPR Tool
Marketers can now access a one-stop dashboard to view the unique and total number of followers for a curated influencer list, in order to better assess which influencers will result in the best reach and conversions for a particular campaign. With these insights now available, marketers can successfully source the right influencers for activations, for improved ROI on their influencer marketing initiatives. Mediacom APAC is the exclusive partner for the tool.
This pioneering Influencer Campaign Optimization Tool is being piloted with P&G and will be rolled out to other markets over the coming months.
Priyali Kamath, Brand Director, Hair Care, P&G Asia-Pacific, said, “This innovative tool from HYPR and MediaCom brings data-driven insights to influencer selection by identifying and optimizing the KOLs most appropriate to the brand. Typically, we have seen that there is limited factual data on influencers, and selection is often based on qualitative factors like perceived popularity and topical trends. This unique tool removes this ambiguity, eliminating redundancies in the KOL mix. We are excited to be the first to test this in the Philippines.”
MediaCom’s APAC Global Business Lead for P&G, Nihar Das, added, “We are proud to trial this ground-breaking audience tool on the P&G business first, ultimately helping the world’s biggest advertiser to better understand and optimize their influencer strategies through real, observed data and insights. In doing so, we are setting a new quality benchmark for the future of influencer strategies and metrics, which results in more precise budgeting and greater effectiveness for all marketers.”
At the time of this announcement, Gil Eyal, CEO and Co-Founder of HYPR, said, “The opportunity to work with Mediacom to understand the needs of big players in the influencer space was invaluable.”
Gil added, “Their understanding of the specific challenges that their clients are facing in the space allowed us to customize a solution that will ensure every dollar they spend on influencer marketing is better optimized.”
Currently, HYPR provides the world’s largest and smartest influencer index. Marketers can reach large audiences at scale by targeting influencers based on their audience demographics such as age, location, and interests. Having access to these audience insights is essential to running a successful influencer marketing campaign.
Medallia Recognizes World's Most Innovative Customer Experience Leaders
IBM, Generali, Sage, and Comcast win Medallia Expy Customer Awards
Medallia Inc., the global leader in customer experience management, announced the winners of the first-ever Medallia Expy Customer Awards, recognizing excellence in creating impactful customer experiences. The Medallia Expy Awards reward members of the Medallia community who are innovating and winning through creating impactful experiences for customers and employees. Companies were selected by a panel of judges including Medallia partners Deloitte Digital, LRW, commonFont, and the CXPA.
IBM has built powerful connections with customers across touchpoints to understand their experiences and improve the relationship. IBM won the Engage Every Customer award.
“With interactions ranging from mobile apps to sales touchpoints to technical support, it’s more difficult than ever to keep a pulse on the customer journey. Our customized self-service approach to CX offers the flexibility to provide support around more than 300 product offerings and reach a level understanding of every customer, even those who aren’t actively engaged in providing feedback, and often in advance of interactions through predictive analytics. The results are tremendous: we can measure positive impact on the growth of the business.” Kathy McGettrick, VP Market Development & Insights, IBM.
Generali systematically measures, analyzes, and improves experiences through customer feedback. Generali won the Optimize Every Experience award.
“We’ve successfully implemented and adopted the Generali Group NPS Program to create a differentiated experience for customers, to lean on customer insights to make each touchpoint better, and to grow our business based on the interactions customers have with Generali across the automotive and health insurance businesses. The process of improving the customer experience is never done, and we remain committed to harnessing the power of customer feedback to delight our customers, make structural improvements and use insights to shape the way our business operates.” Hari Shankar Mishra, AVP Customer Service at Future Generali.
Sage drives real-time collaboration and accountability by personalizing data, insights, and workflows for employees to take action. Sage won the Activate Every Employee award.
“To develop the best possible experience requires that everyone in our organisation has a deep understanding of customer demands and pain points, from executives to frontline contact centre employees. Putting in place a structured approach to gathering and utilising real-time feedback has created a major cultural shift, sparking positive changes to the business and creating a greater sense of ownership for the customer experience throughout the organization” John Patterson, VP Customer Experience at Sage.
Comcast has succeeded in wiring the entire organization to create a customer-centric culture, systematically driving action, and winning on customer experience. Comcast won the Transform Your Company award.
“Comcast is focused on creating great experiences for our customers and employees by placing their feedback at the center of everything we do. Our customer-centric culture is empowered by the real-time feedback we receive from customers and employees through the Net Promoter System and Medallia solution. This information helps us make the operational, technical, and process improvements needed to continuously improve our customer’s experience.” Graham Tutton, VP NPS Operations at Comcast.
Winners were announced at Experience ’18, the premier global customer experience conference.
BounceX Appoints Yiftah Frechter as New Chief Technology Officer
Yiftah is a Former Undertone and Sizmek Executive Brings 20 Years of Engineering, Product Management and Leadership Experience to the Company That Created the First Revenue Channel in 10 Years
BounceX, the leading People-Based Marketing (PBM) cloud, has announced Yiftah Frechter as Chief Technology Officer. An expert in marketing, advertising and media technologies, Frechter was formerly Vice President of Engineering at Undertone and Vice President of Research and Development at Sizmek (Mediamind). He also served as the CTO and co-founder of Legolas Media, which was acquired in 2014 by Undertone. Yiftah brings to this new position 20 years of experience scaling global technology platforms.
At the time of this announcement, Ryan Urban, CEO of BounceX, said, “Yiftah has a proven playbook for taking a company like BounceX through its next several stages of growth. He’s a strategic addition to our leadership team and his appointment is an exciting turbo charge to our expansive growth and vision.”
Yiftah Frechter is a key hire as BounceX expands into new market segments and geographies. BounceX recently announced $37 Million in funding and over the next two years plans to expand to 600 employees globally, with a concentration in its NYC and the UK offices.
In his role as CTO, Yiftah Frechter will continue to evolve the company’s internal strategic technical direction as well as make sure BounceX is providing the best technologies to their elite and dynamic client base. Today, over 350 companies work with BounceX, including world-leading enterprises such as Forever21, Avis, JetBlue, CNN, Uniqlo, and Comcast.
At the time of this announcement, Ryan Urban, CEO of BounceX, said, “Yiftah has a proven playbook for taking a company like BounceX through its next several stages of growth. He’s a strategic addition to our leadership team and his appointment is an exciting turbo charge to our expansive growth and vision.”
Yiftah added, “BounceX is the first new scalable revenue channel in 10 years, and I find that extremely exciting to be a part of. Not only is the platform promising, the culture and team I’m joining are unparalleled.”
A lean startup since fruition, the company recently raised $37M in Series B funding and was named one of the Top 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Companies to Work For by Glassdoor. They are also Inc. 5000’s fastest growing software company in the US and the seventh fastest growing company overall; #5 on Deloitte’s North America Technology Fast 500; #1 in New York for Entrepreneur & Culture IQ’s Top Company Culture; and Crain’s New York Best Place to Work.
Julian Morelis, Chief Commercial Officer - MPP Global
Julian Morelis Chief Commercial Officer, MPP Global
Companies are preparing for GDPR and the post-GDPR era. With a clear disruption in order of business, it’s time to envision the strategy to ensure that marketing and sales teams are equally prepared for the new state in the tech industry. To better understand the impact of GDPR on the B2B and B2C data marketing companies and how budgeting would be crucial in this battle, we spoke to Julian Morelis, Chief Commercial Officer at MPP Global.
Html code here! Replace this with any non empty text and that's it.
Tell us about your role at MPP Global and how you got here.
I serve as the Chief Commercial Officer at MPP Global and I have been with the company for just over four years. I started off my journey at MPP Global as the Vice President of Channel & Strategic Alliances and progressed to this role within a year of starting. My remit covers sales, marketing, product, account management, channel and client experience.
How should brands prepare for the post-GDPR era? How would MPP Global’s latest survey help companies to sail through the disruption?
Brands should be preparing for GDPR by implementing the following disciplines:
Establishing and implementing a risk committee
Appointing a Data Protection Officer
Conducting in-depth audits of all systems, applications, databases and third-party suppliers that would come within scope of GDPR compliance
Sourcing third-party GDPR specialists to conduct in-depth GDPR readiness assessments on their business
Achieving compliance with GDPR codes of conduct yet-to-be published by the Supervisory Authority
Achieving certification with yet-to-be published certification bodies that are recognized by the Supervisory Authority
Why is there so much confusion on GDPR?
The GDPR framework is highly complex, as it caters to PII data that can be used in many different ways to commercially target and engage data subjects. It is also very new and there are many areas that still need to be properly defined over the coming months. Keep an eye out for the latest developments from the Article 29 Working Party Guidance.
Would GDPR affect B2B and B2C data marketing companies equally?
Yes, GDPR would apply to any company collecting PII data for professional or commercial purposes aimed at B2B or B2C customers located in the EU, regardless of whether or not the products or services are linked to a payment. GDPR even extends to include companies based outside of the EU that actively sell to businesses or customers located within the EU. An example of this, for instance, is a business located in the US that provides goods or services in:
EU languages,
EU currencies
Or advertises to EU based companies and/or EU based customers.
GDPR doesn’t apply to:
Identifiable information related to a business,
A deceased person, or
The processing of PII data by an individual purely for the purpose of personal or household activity and therefore not connected to a professional or commercial related activity.
Companies are setting aside anywhere between $1k and $10k for GDPR? Which areas would that budget be capitalized in?
Investment in any infrastructure required to become GDPR compliant could potentially be capitalized. Training is also a key investment requirement under the GDPR.
Why was GDPR really necessary given the kind of technologies we have to prevent data breaches?
GDPR was initiated because of the inconsistency in the interpretation, implementation and application of the current EU Data Protection Directive, as well as the rapid development of technology facilitating the large-scale collection and sharing of personally identifiable information (or PII data), together with the fact that customers are more willing to provide their PII data in order to receive a tailored or personalized service.
GDPR will also create a safe and secure framework that protects the rights of customers, which includes the right to:
Be informed prior to collection of PII data,
Access and change their details,
Object,
Be forgotten,
Transfer their information and
Be informed of a breach.
The obligation on businesses will be to:
Only collect PII data that is reasonably required to deliver the product or service being provided to the customer
Only retain the PII data as long as is necessary to deliver such products or services
Avoid collecting unnecessary sensitive information like racial origin, religious belief, sexual orientation, political viewpoints, medical conditions, etc.
Treat PII data relating to children as sensitive
GDPR aims to drive economic development by allowing the free movement of PII data within the EU and therefore:
Those companies that are willing to embrace this new framework and are prepared to operate in a diligent and responsible manner when providing products or services to customers living within the EU will benefit from this;
Those businesses that do not embrace the GDPR framework and act negligently or recklessly will face fines of up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of annual group revenue.
Would GDPR affect the US-based companies with no direct connection with EU operations? If yes, please elaborate.
No, as long as these US companies are not actively targeting, selling or providing services to data subjects residing within the EU.
Which companies would be greatly affected by GDPR?
Companies that use AI, ML and other technologies facilitating the large-scale collection and sharing of PII data in order to deliver their product or service being provided to EU customers will be greatly affected by GDPR.
Apart from penalties levied by the regulators, what would be the impact of non-compliance on brands?
Data breaches could result in:
Reputational and business risk of public notifications,
Fines of 4 percent of group revenue or 20 million euros, whichever is greater and/or
How would AI/ML rescue companies from GDPR? Which companies are best placed to manage their GDPR strategies?
Initial reviews would suggest that AI/ML would add to the complexity of GDPR rather that rescue companies from it, however it is still very early, so time will tell.
Unstructured data, simply stated in advertising terms, is any piece of information or behavioral signal collected in its simplest form. Once an assumption is made about the person behind that data signal and it coalesces with other signals, it then becomes segmented data or a “Data Segment.” This is a form of institutionalized stereotyping common to advertising that was born out of a technical need to generate scale and speed. Data providers, including Google and Facebook, commonly curate vague taxonomies like “auto intenders in Austin, Texas” or “high-income retail enthusiasts.”
