Gaming Giants Win Big Data Challenge With Anodot to Keep Millions of Players in the Game

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March 19, 2018

Brands Must Show Loyalty To Earn Loyalty, According To Alliance Data's New Consumer Study

Gen Z and Millennials Play by Their Own Set of Rules, and Now Loyalty Does, Too

NextGen consumers are leading the retail industry to a new view on loyalty, according to new research by Alliance Data‘s card services business, a provider of a market-leading private label, co-brand, and business credit card programs. The newly released study, “The Rules of NextGen Loyalty,” reveals how Gen Z and Millennials have been empowered by unique experiences, technology, and the power of choice to engage brands and experience loyalty in truly new ways.

Shannon Andrick

“This study really unpacks the shopping and loyalty preferences of today’s youngest consumer segment. One-to-one conversations with real people supported by in-depth research has provided a unique view into the mindset of today’s youngest generations and what they expect from brand relationships. The loyalty landscape has truly shifted from brands driving loyalty to brands earning loyalty,” said Shannon Andrick, vice president of marketing advancement for Alliance Data’s card services business.

Also Read: Millennials Are Causing a Sales Revolution

Gen Z and Millennials play by their own set of rules. And now loyalty does too. Brands can no longer drive loyalty, they need to earn it

Conducted by Alliance Data’s Analytics & Insights Institute, “The Rules of NextGen Loyalty” study used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods including mobile diaries and digital app tracking to determine behaviors, follow-up one-on-one Skype conversations to provide context, and a survey to identify the differences, perspectives, and preferences among younger generations. The progressive approach sheds light on the difference between what consumers say and what they do.

To create insights that can help brands understand the market and tap into trends based on customer behavior, the study took a close look at what brand loyalty means to each of these segments:

Older Millennials: Born 1982-1989
Younger Millennials: Born 1990-1997
Generation Z: Born 1998-2010

Also Read: Over Half of Millennials Check Snapchat Daily, Much More Than Boomers and Gen Xers

Some highlights from the report:

Loyalty is earned. Understanding the role of and influences on choice is more important than ever before: 63% of younger consumers agree they have many choices of where to shop, so a brand must show them loyalty to earn their business. Once brands recognize the unique motivations of Gen Z and Millennials, they have taken the critical first step in building deep brand connectivity and earning lasting loyalty.
Loyalty is complex. Traditionally, loyalty has been viewed as one-dimensional. Yet, loyalty is anything but simple. Research shows when it comes to life loyalty and brand loyalty, a continuum emerges spanning a range from functional to emotional. Different types of loyalty span the continuum from traditional, mostly functional loyalty, to brand love, emotional loyalty. Re-thinking a brand’s approach to loyalty means understanding that true loyalty requires a combination of function and emotion.
Loyalty is fragile. Today’s younger consumers are increasingly unforgiving. They are empowered by instant access and greater choice to want more and “put up” with less. In fact, 76% of younger consumers only give brands two to three chances before they stop shopping them. One in three consumers said nothing could be done when asked what a brand could do to win them back.
Loyalty is multifaceted. Brands have typically viewed loyalty through a transactional lens. But NextGen loyalty is a combination of transaction (function) and emotion–traditional brand loyalty and brand love loyalty. Transactions aren’t the only indicators of loyalty. Brands must understand customers’ unique needs and think differently about measuring loyalty. Some consumers want the basics while others need more.

Recommended Read: Beating the Big Guys Is All About Brand Loyalty

Azalead Announces First GDPR-Compliant Account-Based Marketing Platform for Global Manufacturers

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MTS Staff Writer

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March 19, 2018

Azalead Announces First GDPR-compliant Account-Based Marketing Platform for Global Manufacturers

March 22nd Webinar Explains How to Address GDPR Risk with IP Based B2B Marketing Technology

Azalead, the ABM platform for Global Manufacturers, has addressed the imminent new data privacy regulations that go into effect in May 2018. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a newly enacted policy by which the European Union (EU) will strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the EU. It covers any company doing business in the EU or with an EU citizen. Fines for companies failing to meet GDPR obligations can be as much as 4% of worldwide revenues and €20M.

Nick Heys

“The problem global B2B marketers face today is that most marketing technology vendors are not yet prepared to support and share the burden of GDPR compliance,” said Nick Heys, Founder and CEO at Azalead.

Also Read: How to Beat Procrastination with a GDPR Marketing Compliance Plan?

At its core, GDPR specifies 6 lawful ways to process data – of which consent is one – before using personal information including professional email addresses. Individuals will have a right to be forgotten and to withdraw consent, which means that contacts on an email list could request that their personal data be deleted from companies’ computer servers, including that collected, managed and used by B2B marketing technology providers on their behalf.

Didier Andrieu

“Azalead is now prepared to support its clients with GDPR after executing on our compliance plan that addresses personal data security, data hosting, subject data access rights, internal processes and increased transparency for our customers and their clients,” said Didier Andrieu, VP Data & Privacy at Azalead.

Also Read: Azalead Opens US Office, Hires Industry Veteran Walter Sharp as Head of Sales

The Azalead platform drives revenues by serving personalized and relevant content to anonymous buyers at target accounts. As a complement to Marketing Automation and CRM systems, Azalead sends ads to employees at target accounts and tracks engagement based on company IP address rather than email.

“GDPR is going to drive companies to rethink their direct marketing strategies and look at ways to maintain a personalized approach without violating personal privacy legislation. With careful planning and prioritization, Account-based marketing is an ideal option for businesses to engage their best customers and prospects with specific messages and content. GDPR provides the catalyst to invest in an effective way for marketers to develop meaningful relationships with buyers,” said Julian Archer, Senior Research Director at SiriusDecisions.

Azalead is offering a webinar for Global Manufacturers to learn how to address GDPR and understand new IP based B2B marketing technology solutions to engage with key accounts.

Brillio Acquires Comity Designs

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March 19, 2018

Deal Extends Brillio’s Front Office Technology Capabilities and Salesforce Expertise

Brillio, a leader in digital transformation solutions, today announced the acquisition of Comity Designs, a cloud and mobile solutions provider and notable Salesforce consulting partner. Brillio’s “Faster with Brillio” methodology, along with Comity solutions, will enhance the company’s offer across verticals such as banking and finance, consumer goods, media, pharmaceuticals, retail and telecom.

Brillio has executed several large-scale digital transformation engagements using its Experience Objective (XOtm)-led design, sales and marketing analytics capability. The addition of Comity makes Brillio a partner of choice for front-office transformation engagements and further strengthens engagement with C-suite and line-of-business executives. The combination brings the most advanced digital transformation strategies to the enterprise, measurably impacting the bottom line.

Also Read: Salesforce Is #1 in Fortune’s List Of ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’

“We are excited to have Comity and their unique technology development and Salesforce consulting experience on the Brillio team. Together with Comity, we have industry leading front-office transformation capabilities that help clients deliver differentiated and engaging experiences to their customers,” said Raj Mamodia, CEO of Brillio.

Dushyant Pandya

Dushyant Pandya, CEO and Co-Founder of Comity Designs, added, “We’re all really excited to be part of the Brillio family. Brillio’s commitment to customer success is perfectly aligned with our mission. Comity built its business on a deep understanding of the Salesforce platform and expertise with product development. Our combined capabilities and expanded presence bring breadth and depth of services to support any enterprise through their digital transformation.”

Also Read: Sephora Selects Salesforce to Power Digital Shopping Experiences in Europe

Founded in 2008, by a former Salesforce Product Strategy VP, Dushyant Pandya, Comity has a deep connection to the Salesforce platform. As a “Silver Consulting Partner,” “Product Development Outsourcer Specialist,” and member of “Salesforce Accelerate,” the addition of Comity Designs significantly elevates Brillio’s ability to partner with enterprises on their path to maximizing value for their end-customers.

Tony Colon

“The combination of Comity and Brillio is exciting for our ecosystem and demonstrates strong momentum around digital transformation. This move highlights how our world-class platform is helping ecosystem partners deliver phenomenal levels of digital transformation and success for our customers,” said Tony Colon, SVP, Customer Success Group, Salesforce.

Comity brings to Brillio a global talent pool of more than 100 certified Salesforce consultants skilled with design and development expertise and a history of more than 450 highly successful implementations. The company’s headquarters in California and locations in Atlanta and Pune, India, will operate in concert with Brillio locations around the globe.

AI-Powered Yotpo Insights Unveiled for Direct Commerce Brands to Analyze Customer Feedback at Scale

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March 19, 2018

AI-Powered Yotpo Insights Unveiled for Direct Commerce Brands

Yotpo ‘Insights’ Runs on Artificial Intelligence to Give Brands the Ability To “Read” User-Generated Content to Facilitate Customer-Centric Business Decisions

Yotpo, a leading user-generated content marketing platform, has announced the availability of their new feedback analysis solution “Insights” at Shoptalk, the world’s largest conference for retail and eCommerce innovation. Yotpo Insights enables marketing, customer service, and product teams to better understand customer feedback at scale, with real-time business intelligence to improve the overall customer experience, as well as inform operational, commercial, and product development strategies.

Brands Could Leverage Yotpo Insights for Better Customer Feedback Analyses

At the time of this announcement, Tomer Tagrin, CEO and Cofounder, Yotpo, said, “Through reviews and other user-generated content, millions of consumers every day are telling companies directly about their experiences, providing feedback on everything from itchy fabrics and faulty clasps to earned compliments and superlative service. With such fierce and growing competition for consumer attention, brands cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to their customers.”

Through a combination of technology, integrations, and partnerships, Yotpo makes it easy to effectively leverage customer content throughout the buyer journey to increase trust, social proof, and sales. An official partner of Google, Facebook, and Shopify, Yotpo has raised $101 million in funding and has over 300 employees globally.

Tomer added, “The sheer volume of content makes manually reading feedback both impractical and imprecise. With the launch of Insights, brands can analyze every piece of customer feedback quickly and efficiently, identify the most important topics to customers, and connect those topics to sentiment–all from one dashboard.”

Yotpo Insights Uses Natural Language Processing

With Yotpo Insights, fast-growing direct commerce brands such as Adore Me, MVMT, UNTUCKit and GoPro are able to leverage artificial intelligence to unlock what customers are saying about their products and brand. Yotpo Insights uses natural language processing to analyze the grammatical structure of the text to uncover topics mentioned in reviews and their related opinions. It also uses sentiment analysis to score every opinion on a negative to positive scale, and semantic grouping to categorize different keywords to maximize the information available on each topic.

Read More: Is GDPR Really Changing Ad Tech?

Additionally, the algorithms were trained on a dataset of at least 32 million reviews, enabling brands to effectively identify conflicting sentiments towards different topics within the same review (e.g., great product but slow delivery) — ensuring a 92 percent accuracy that will improve over time, as the algorithms ingest more data.

“The secret to our growth has always been, and continues to be, intrinsically related to how well we are listening to our customers. It’s important to analyze your customer feedback efficiently, understand what matters to them most and use this data to inform marketing, product and customer experience initiatives,” said Sandra Negrea, Customer Engagement Analyst, Adore Me. Sandra’s exploratory use of Insights led to the discovery of an untapped audience segment and yielded significant efficiencies.

Yotpo Insights empowers eCommerce brands to drill down into the factors that have the highest impact on customer satisfaction, enabling them to invest time and resources in areas that will make an impact on their business. Brands are also able to compare performance with similar businesses using industry benchmarks, as well as track changes over time to identify trends, get alerted to new issues, and gain instant feedback on new product releases.

Currently, Yotpo is an industry-recognized customer content marketing platform of choice for leading commerce brands. With Yotpo, businesses can collect every type of user-generated content and use it to build a stronger brand and better customer experience. Yotpo’s fully integrated solution enables brands to collect, curate, manage and publish user-generated content from a single platform.

Vigo Video Launches Updated Application

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March 19, 2018

Vigo Video Makes it Easier Than Ever to Capture and Share Vivid Moments from Life

The original short video community Vigo Video has updated the app to include an enhanced video shooting and editing experience, offering a more powerful platform for talent around the world to create, discover and be rewarded. Creators are turning their mobile screens into stages, exhibiting a world of comedy, beauty, animals and more in flashes of fun.

Vigo Video empowers users to capture the most vivid moments in life by offering easy-to-use and powerful video editing tools. A variety of animated stickers and special effects are available to add to the videos and create unique content with just a touch of a button. And with the new real-time beautify camera, one can magically enhance their complexion and brighten up the eyes to create a flawless presence on screen.

Also Read: Dailymotion Expands Senior Leadership to Grow Global Advertising Capabilities

Vigo Video uses AI technology to help users discover interesting videos and connect with audiences for their creative works through personalized content feeds. The more one views and creates and shares, the more one can discover and connect with creators and audiences.

Sharing Vigo Videos is easy. With just a click of a button, videos can be shared with the most popular social platforms in the world.

Users enjoy a rewarding experience in the Vigo Video community. In addition to showcasing the videos to a broad audience and making friends with people with similar interests, users win special rewards and prizes for their creativity and originality.

Also Read: ‘Make It Viral’ Announces Crowdfunding for Revolutionary Blockchain-Based Video Sharing Platform

The opportunity to create, discover and be rewarded has made Vigo Video a hit. In February this year, Vigo Video topped the free app chart on Google Play India.

Beat the Q, a unique live mobile quiz format enabling viewers to participate and win exciting prizes, was launched on the Vigo Video app in February. This is the first time in India that a mobile platform has seen the participation of Bollywood superstars playing quizmasters and interacting with the fans. Some of the renowned Bollywood artists like Sonakshi Sinha, Bipasha Basu, and Parineeti Chopra turned hosts and entertained the audiences on the app.

Recommended Read: The Rise of Outstream Video: From Fraud to Darling

Dailymotion Expands Senior Leadership to Grow Global Advertising Capabilities

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March 19, 2018

Dailymotion Expands Senior Leadership to Grow Global Advertising Capabilities

Dailymotion, a Vivendi-owned Platform Appointed Two Management Hires in New York and Paris to Bolster Advertising Product and Partnerships

Dailymotion, a leading destination for video discovery and exploration, is deepening its global advertising capabilities with the appointment of two key senior leadership hires. Nola Solomon is joining Dailymotion as Vice President of Global Programmatic Partnerships while Michael Aidane signed on as Vice President of Engineering.

Both executives would report to Bichoï Bastha, the company’s Chief Ad Tech Officer.

Currently, Dailymotion is recognized as a leading video platform for discovering events and ideas from diverse industries.

Nola Solomon joined Dailymotion from The Trade Desk, where she served as Global Director of Data Partnerships and helped lead the company’s global strategy for OTT, cross-device, and entertainment partnerships. Prior to The Trade Desk, she headed AOL’s APAC mobile supply team in Singapore before transitioning to Global Director of Mobile, Product Solutions & Commercialization at AOL where she led the company’s innovative product solutions for emerging mobile formats and technologies. Nola Solomon is based in New York.

A veteran advertising technology leader, Michael Aidane joins Dailymotion from Tsadei, a Big Data analytics consultancy, where he served as Managing Director. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Products and Data Science at RadiumOne, a DSP/DMP with a focus on first-party data analytics. For this role, Michael Aidane is relocating from San Francisco to join Dailymotion’s EMEA headquarters in Paris.

At the time of this announcement, Bichoï Bastha said, “Nola and Michael’s deep expertise in programmatic and ad tech will make an immediate impact across our entire global advertising team and they will play a pivotal role in upcoming evolutions to our advertising product offering.”

Bichoï added, “As marketers and their agency partners seek more efficient and brand-safe methods for reaching their most relevant consumers, we look forward to continuing to evolve our product to meet and exceed these needs.”

In October 2017, Dailymotion relaunched its platform with a focus on premium publisher partnerships. The new focus has enabled Dailymotion to provide a premium, brand safe environment for the world’s leading advertisers and publishers.

LanguageWire Acquires Frontlab

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March 19, 2018

The Acquisition Of Frontlab Further Strengthens Languagewire’s Position In The Global Localization Services Market

LanguageWire has now acquired 100% of the shares in Frontlab ApS, thereby acquiring all assets in Frontlab. The acquisition highlights LanguageWire’s goal, with CataCap behind it, to continually invest in technological solutions and to create the ultimate software platform for optimizing customers’ workflows.

The acquisition of Frontlab further strengthens LanguageWire’s position in global localization services and also secures the company a leading position in a USD 40 billion+ market. For LanguageWire’s customers, the acquisition means even greater opportunities to streamline their workflows and make further savings.

Henrik Lottrup

Henrik Lottrup, CEO at LanguageWire, says: “The companies we talk to tell us that the reality in the modern marketing department is that developing both online and offline content and getting it localized into multiple languages costs time and money. The result is often numerous proofreadings, lengthy processes and a high fail rate.”

Also Read: GDPR: Take a Long, Hard Look at Yourselves in 2018

Frontlab and LanguageWire have each developed unique cloud-based tools, which are tailored to meet the increasing need in the market for optimizing content handling and distributing it on an ever-growing number of channels, with the requirement to be faster and more cost-effective than before. Frontlab’s solution will, therefore, form a natural part of LanguageWire’s DNA, which is rooted in being a leader in the field of technology.

A shared ambition for the acquisition is to be able to offer all LanguageWire’s and Frontlab’s customers a chance to benefit from the interaction between two specialized tools and thus optimize their current workflows. This will be achieved by integrating Frontlab’s solution as a core component in LanguageWire’s market-leading platform during the course of 2018. The integration will take place in a close collaboration between LanguageWire’s development department and Frontlab’s own team.

Also Read: Why Will RCS Messaging Be More Effective Than Apps

“LanguageWire specializes in servicing enterprise customers, and part of our focus is helping marketing departments build time and resource-saving content workflows. We see a rising need to optimize processes. We firmly believe that we can make life even better and easier for our customers. We are of course proud of our acquisition because we are not only acquiring a unique team, we also get the opportunity to bring our development teams together and to create an even better solution,” says Lottrup.

Ib Tørslef

The collaboration means that the founders of Frontlab, Ruvan Fernando and Ib Tørsleff, will join LanguageWire’s management team and will play an important role in the shared journey from here on. About the acquisition, Ib Tørslef says: “We are convinced that, together, LanguageWire and Frontlab offer a unique solution, which will help streamline content production to customers’ global markets. Through our collaboration, we look forward to further strengthening LanguageWire on the technology front and also to offering our existing customers an improved total experience”. Frontlab currently serves customers such as Bosch, Weber and Danfoss.

Recommended Read: Beating the Big Guys Is All About Brand Loyalty

Tencent Video Leads Chinese Online Video Industry with 62.59 Million Paid Subscriptions

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March 19, 2018

Tencent and their breakthroughs in Web3.0 — Tencent Video Achieved 62.59 Million Paid Subscriptions, Maintaining No.1 Position in China Online Video Industry

Comprehensive and Premium Content Matrix Caters to Diversified Viewers’ Demand Whilst Self-Commissioned Programs Drive Its Paid Subscription Growth

Tencent Video announced its paid subscriptions has reached 62.59 million as of the end of February 2018, which further enhanced its leading position as the largest online video platform in China. This demonstrated the platform’s rapid growth following its announcement of 43 million paid subscriptions by the end of September 2017, which made it the No.1 online video platform in China. At the same time, Tencent Video achieved average mobile daily active users (DAU) of 137 million on mobile devices in the fourth quarter of 2017. As measured by these two core dimensions, Tencent Video attains the leading position in the online video industry in China.

Apart from these, Tencent Video is also leading the industry according to professional third parties’ analysis on the comprehensive competitiveness of online video platforms.

Also Read: How GlassView’s Global Connected TV Platform is Being Embraced By Advertisers

According to iResearch, the leading provider of online audience measurement and consumer insights in China, its mVideoTracker data showed that Tencent covered 790 million units of video streaming devices in January 2018, nearly 100 million units more than the second player.

According to App Annie, Tencent Video was ranked sixth in China’s iOS top grossing chart in 2017. It ranked the 3rd in the fourth quarter of 2017, following two games apps (Honor of Kings and Fantasy Westward Journey) and was the No.1 in the video category.

In terms of content, according to Vlinkage, a professional video and new media data monitoring company in China, Tencent Video achieved the lead in the industry, covering 80% of the top 20 most popular TV drama series in China.

Also Read: Tencent Video Demonstrates Original Content At Cannes To Accelerate Its Output To Global Market

In terms of brand recognition, according to the 2017 Video Industry Competitiveness Tracking Survey done by Gisi, a third party market research organization, Tencent Video ranked top with 44% of top of mind brand, far surpassing the second brand by 17 percentage points, which reflected the significant success of Tencent Video in brand recognition.

All the above indicators demonstrate that Tencent has established its leadership in the online video market.

Tencent Video achieved this outstanding performance through its committed investment and innovation in content, operation, and marketing. It has built up a comprehensive and premium content library consisting of TV drama series, movies, variety shows, documentaries, children’s programs, animation music and more.

Also Read: What You Need To Know About Video

The popular TV drama series, especially the self-commissioned content, has delivered outstanding performance, such as The Nothing Gold Can Stay, the Candle in the Tomb series, Country Love Story series, The Eternal Love, A Love So Beautiful, have further strengthened subscribers’ stickiness and have driven rapid growth in the subscription. Other successful programs, such as The Coming One, a self-commissioned variety show), animation series including The Glory and Fights Break Sphere, and The Blue Planet II (a BBC documentary), have also contributed to the rapid growth in subscription, enriching the viewing experience of subscribers.

“At Tencent, we always endeavor to offer superior user experience and member services. Tencent is the first video platform which supports Dolby vision in China and we have developed various privileges for subscribers including quick time play, reserved cache, blue-ray display and interactive bullet screen. We are dedicated to providing users not only privileges on content and entertainment, but also lively and enjoyable viewing experience,” said Thirty Sun, Vice President, CEO, Tencent Penguin Pictures.

Io-Tahoe Announces General Availability of Machine Learning-Driven Smart Data Discovery Platform

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March 19, 2018

Io-Tahoe Announces General Availability of Machine Learning-Driven Smart Data Discovery Platform

Adds New Data Catalog Feature to Enable Data Governance, Enhance Data Management and Achieve Compliance for Today’s Data-Driven Enterprises

Io-Tahoe LLC, a pioneer in machine learning-driven smart data discovery products that span a wide range of heterogeneous technology platforms, from traditional databases and data warehouses to data lakes and other modern repositories, announced the General Availability (GA) launch of the Io-Tahoe smart data discovery platform. Io-Tahoe made the announcement from the Gartner Data & Analytics 2018 Summit. Io-Tahoe was designated as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Data Management 2017”; the company was listed as Rokitt Astra, which it acquired in May 2017.

Also Read: Io-Tahoe Unveils Data Discovery Solution To Enable GDPR

The GA version includes the addition of Data Catalog, a new feature that allows data owners and data stewards to utilize a machine learning-based smart catalog to create, maintain and search business rules; define policies and provide governance workflow functionality. Io-Tahoe’s data discovery capability provides complete business rule management and enrichment. It enables a business user to govern the rules and define policies for critical data elements. It allows data-driven enterprises to enhance information about data automatically, regardless of the underlying technology and build a data catalog.

“Today’s digital business is driving new requirements for data discovery. Now more than ever enterprises are demanding effective, and comprehensive, access to their data – regardless of where it is retained – with a clear view into more than its metadata, but its contents as well. Io-Tahoe is delivering a robust platform for data discovery to empower governance and compliance with a deeper view and understanding into data and its relationships,” said Stewart Bond, Director Data Integration and Integrity Software Research, IDC.

Also Read: Profisee Announces Attendance at Gartner’s Data & Analytics Summit 2018

“Io-Tahoe is unique as it allows the organization to conduct data discovery across heterogeneous enterprise landscapes, ranging from databases, data warehouses and data lakes, bringing disparate data worlds together into a common view which will lead to a universal metadata store. This enables organizations to have full insight into their data, in order to better achieve their business goals, drive data analytics, enhance data governance and meet regulatory demands required in advance of regulations such as GDPR,” said Oksana Sokolovsky, CEO, Io-Tahoe.

Increasing governance and compliance demands have created a dramatic opportunity for data discovery. According to MarketsandMarkets, the data discovery market is estimated to grow from $4.33 billion USD in 2016 to $10.66 billion USD in 2021i. This is driven by the increasing importance of data-driven decision making and self-service business intelligence (BI) tools. However, the challenge of integrating the growing number of disparate platforms, databases, data lakes and other silos of data has prevented the comprehensive governance, and use, of enterprise data.

Also Read: Marketo and Google Cloud Join Forces to Transform Engagement Solutions for the Enterprise

Io-Tahoe’s smart data discovery platform features a unique algorithmic approach to auto-discover rich information about data and data relationships. Its machine learning technology looks beyond metadata, at the data itself for greater insight and visibility into complex data sets, across the enterprise. Built to scale for even the largest of enterprises, Io-Tahoe makes data available to everyone in the organization, untangling the complex maze of data relationships and enabling applications such as data science, data analytics, data governance and data management.

The technology-agnostic platform spans silos of data and creates a centralized repository of discovered data upon which users can enable Io-Tahoe’s Data Catalog to search and govern. Through convenient self-service features, users can bolster team engagement through the simplified and accurate sharing of data knowledge, business rules and reports. Here users have a greater ability to analyze, visualize and leverage business intelligence and other tools, all of which have become the foundation to power data processes.

Wunderman Appoints James Sanderson to Lead Onsite Agency Model Wunderman Inside

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March 19, 2018

Wunderman Appoints James Sanderson to Lead Onsite Agency Model Wunderman Inside

Wunderman Inside Has Been Launched Following Consultation with Clients Looking for More Flexible Agency Models

Wunderman, the leading global digital agency and part of WPP, has launched Wunderman Inside, a new agency operating model to provide its world-class digital services onsite for its clients.

Wunderman Inside has been launched following extensive consultation with significant clients who are looking for more flexible agency models, particularly for their digital marketing. Wunderman Inside will provide the optimal mix of onsite and in-agency resources to provide more proximity to clients for faster work combined with the strategic and creative depth that agencies can bring. It will deploy integrated teams able to deliver the full range of Wunderman’s services from digital marketing, data and analytics and commerce, powered by Wunderman’s marketing technology capabilities.

Also Read: Wunderman and POSSIBLE Join Forces to Form Global Digital Powerhouse

James Sanderson

James Sanderson has been appointed Managing Director to lead this new practice. He joins from creative in-house agency Oliver UK, where he was Chief Operating Officer. Prior to Oliver, James held senior roles at Teamspirit, Digitas and spent 10 years at Glue Isobar. Whilst at Oliver, James was responsible for operations, working with UK and International Clients.

Speaking Sanderson added, “Wunderman is a highly-regarded agency because its services aren’t static – it understands what clients want and continually develops what it offers to meet those needs. I’m really looking forward to leading this new practice and helping Wunderman to reinforce its client-side credentials.”

Also Read: Wunderman Expands its Reach; Acquires Spanish Digital Agency-The Cocktail

Wunderman Inside is an extension of the successful model that Wunderman operates with a number of major clients including News UK, jointly with The & Partnership, Best Buy and Sainsburys.

Mark Read

Mark Read, Wunderman’s Global CEO, said: “There’s growing demand from clients for greater proximity to their marketing teams. Wunderman Inside combines strong on-site resources and the strategic and creative power of the agency to give clients the right balance of speed, cost efficiency and innovation. We believe this is a more effective long-term model than typical in-house agencies that struggle to attract talent and consultancy-led models where clients become dependent on expensive resources. We could not have found a better person than James to lead it. He has extensive experience in the industry, particularly in developing and expanding an in-house creative offering. Now he can do that with the strength of Wunderman behind him.”

AMPLEXOR Announces Neural Machine Translation Solution as the Next Phase in its Artificial Intelligence Programme

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March 19, 2018

AMPLEXOR Announces Neural Machine Translation Solution as the Next Phase in its Artificial Intelligence Programme

Collaboration with the German Research Center for AI (DFKI) Underpins the New Neural Machine Translation (NMT) Solution, Which Will Initially Target the Medical Device Sector

Global digital solutions provider, AMPLEXOR announced the next phase of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) program – to develop an enterprise-grade, neural machine translation solution. The solution, which will target the Medical Device market, is being developed in collaboration with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), one of the largest centers of excellence in AI worldwide.

AMPLEXOR has supported its worldwide customers with ‘smart solutions’ under its broader Content Intelligence (CI) portfolio – enabling organizations to apply artificial intelligence concepts to multilingual content processing. In 2017, AMPLEXOR established a dedicated AI/CI competence center in Madrid to develop these smart solutions.

Markus Welsch

Speaking of this latest phase in AMPLEXOR’s AI journey, Markus Welsch, Vice President Content Intelligence and Chief Solution Architect, AMPLEXOR, commented, “NMT is a very promising translation technology, but still has some way to go to be fit for purpose for true enterprise use. That is exactly what we aim to deliver – enterprise-grade NMT in our translation workflows that address the security, scalability and mission-critical content for demanding operational contexts and use cases.” Markus continues, “This approach to NMT in translation workflows is what the Medical Device market, as an example, is calling out for – a domain that requires absolute accuracy and high precision and where translation errors could lead to regulatory liability and are a leading cause of device recalls. This enterprise-grade capability is a key differentiator in our approach to NMT and one that will help to transform the way companies approach translations, delivering accuracy and efficiency at all times.”

Also Read: NetBase Introduces Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence for Image Analysis

The AMPLEXOR NMT solution will initially focus on life sciences, and specifically on the Medical Device sector. This is part of the $3 trillion healthcare industry, in the US alone, and a sector that researchers and manufacturers are particularly focused on using AI and automation to achieve greater efficiencies and improved accuracy. Following the successful deployment of NMT for the Life Sciences industry, AMPLEXOR aims to expand this capability for use in other sectors.

Mark Evenepoel

“We have long put AI at the heart of our Content Intelligence portfolio,” said Mark Evenepoel, CEO, AMPLEXOR, adding, “An enterprise-grade neural machine translation solution is the next step for us and one that represents a huge opportunity for our customers across industries and applications. We are delighted to combine our domain-specific knowledge and data assets in the Medical Device domain with DFKI’s technology know-how in AI to make this happen.”

Also Read: PowerPost Launches PowerIQ – First Virtual Assistant for Content Marketers

DFKI was founded in 1988, and in the field of innovative commercial software technology using AI, is one of the largest centers of excellence in the world. The AMPLEXOR DFKI relationship stretches back to 2010 when the companies first collaborated on a ‘tribrid’ translation engine R&D project, named taraXÜ.

“Our previously successful engagements with AMPLEXOR show it is a company that understands AI and how it can be used to develop solutions to improve and transform the translation processes,” said Professor Dr. Josef van Genabith, Scientific Director, Multilingual Technologies at DFKI. “This next collaboration will include the development of a neural machine translation engine that aims to be a truly transformative technology in terms of providing natural and fluent translations.”

GDPR: Take a Long, Hard Look at Yourselves in 2018

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Jason Hemingway

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March 19, 2018

Every so often something big comes along that throws a spanner in the business works. There might be mild panic and numerous meetings, but ultimately down the line, everything is usually fine – and if done properly, things can feel as though they’ve changed for the better.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of these spanners, clunking its way through every facet of the business. As the date for GDPR compliance, 25th May, draws ever closer, organizations are frantically trying to get their house in order.

Also Read: The Coming of New Marketing Mix with GDPR: Automated Consent Management for Websites

Fixing a Broken System

Yet GDPR itself isn’t the problem. It’s an attempt to address something that should concern us all: a lack of customer trust in the organizations that gather, store and process data, fueled in part by a wholesale trade in personal information. GDPR is an attempt to fix a broken system, and rebalance it so that it works for individuals and brands alike – but with the customer in control.

The regulation is coming, because, when we boil it down, brands have lost sight of customer needs. Data has created a fog between the two, and the consequent failure to protect customer data has meant that any trust has dissipated. In a world of consumers empowered by the likes of social media, businesses are losing what keeps them ticking – brand loyalty.

GDPR is a nudge for companies to take a good, hard look at themselves. A key part of this opportunity is to use the time to take a step back, decide what it is you want to achieve, and how you want to achieve it with your customers rather than just your customers’ data.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

So, what are customers getting out of their relationship with you? If all you’re doing with their data is finding ways to sell to them, they’re not getting any value. Trust, and therefore loyalty, can vanish in an instant.

Now is the time to recognize that you may not have customer interests at heart, and do something about it. The GDPR deadline could act as the launch date for your new customer strategy, based on a value exchange that will repair the damage caused by years of data misuse.

This value is created through meaningful, consistent engagement over time that builds trust and leads to a stronger, more valuable relationship between business and customer. And how do you achieve that? By using tech that allows you to understand each and every customer as an individual.

To visualize customer journeys in real-time and personalize every interaction you have with a customer so their experience is always relevant.

Also Read: Is GDPR Really Changing Ad Tech?

Looking Under the Bonnet

This relationship acts as a high-level service for the customer, who sees the benefit of coming back time and time again. They feel like the brand knows them well enough to offer timely and relevant interactions, rather than a catch-all approach that goes straight to the department marked ‘spam’.

The customer relationship is at the heart of digital transformation, and the challenge to brands is to restore it back to its pivotal position at the heart of the business.

The GDPR spanner in the works can be the catalyst to repairing your customer relationships. But it’s going to need you, to be honest with what you currently have, and a determination to bring customer interest back to the engine of your brand.

Also Read: Interview with Jason Hemingway, Chief Marketing Officer at Thunderhead

Interview with Eric Porres, CMO, SundaySky

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March 19, 2018

Interview with Eric Porres, CMO at SundaySky

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/eporres” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/eporres/”]

[mnky_testimonial_slider slide_speed=”3″][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Digital transformation means that a certain process uses digital technology to transform (or augment) the consumer journey in a new way.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a video technology company?

When evaluating my options for a CMO role, consumer trends began playing a larger role in the overall marketing industry. The insatiable consumer appetite for video combined with the inexorable rise of relevance (in the form of personalization and brought about by companies like Amazon, NetFlix, Spotify, Apple and Google) meant that if I could find a company building differentiated technology at the intersection of those trends, it would be a compelling opportunity.

From the point of view of a video technology company, how would you define “Digital Transformation’ and “Digital Innovation” respectively?

For me, digital transformation means that a certain process uses digital technology to transform (or augment) the consumer journey in a new way. For instance, Citi uses SundaySky’s SmartVideo to help educate new cardholders on the benefits of Citi’s mobile app, which Citi wants them to take advantage of. Digital innovation means that someone at a Fortune 500 company has a budget to pilot certain new/untested initiatives, and personalized video might fall in that realm.

How do personalized video deliverables match up to the modern-day customer experience standards?

In general, we enable video to go from linear to modular and from static to data-driven — This ability comes at a perfect time when rethinking customer experience. Video historically has a been a broadcast medium — a ‘write once, play anywhere’ initiative. But the new consumer imperative is that brands must get personal with their prospects and customers, or they’ll get ignored. So why wouldn’t you want to treat each customer as an individual and do so in an emotionally arresting way with video? This is what we advocate at SundaySky.

What are the major pain points for businesses when they deal with the multi-touch video engagements?

Sequential storytelling is becoming more important, as is rethinking how to create video in a way that can be modular versus static. It’s no longer about shooting for the ‘perfect 15- or 30-second spot.’ Today, it’s using data to best assemble scenes in real-time that create a 48-second personalized video for customer A to help her on her journey, while a different set of scenes assemble to create a 68-second personalized video to help customer B on his similar (but not the same) journey.

What are the key business video-CRM metrics that modern marketers should have at their fingertips?

At the minimum, it’s the time spent and value created on an exposed versus non-exposed basis. However, it depends on the objective. If a marketer wants to use a personalized video to help reduce call volume at a call center, then understanding the cost-per-call and ROI when a would-be caller watches a personalized video instead becomes imperative. For example, if a financial services marketer uses a personalized video to help drive increases in average-monthly-contributions, then the contribution value over time of the exposed group becomes important. Bottom line: if you can’t ascribe tangible business value to a video initiative, then it’s either for vanity or the initiative belongs in an innovation budget wherein the rest of your marketing efforts can subsidize the cost given the uncertain outcome.

What are your predictions for programmatic video engagements for 2018? How does SundaySky prepare for these?

We’re very excited about the work we’re doing with Facebook and Google to bridge the gap between those two closed attention ecosystems and ultimately be able to deliver the SundaySky SmartVideo to our customers everywhere.

What startups in the martech industry are you watching/keen on right now?

Rather than ‘following the money’ purely, I’m interested in following intriguing and top industry leaders and seeing what gets them excited. For instance, my friend Scott McKinley just took on the CEO role at IDify, a marketing identity startup trying to solve bad data. Anything around identity and/or the creation of a customer data platform (distinct from a data management platform, which historically operates in a ‘cookie-space’) is and will continue to be hot. Chris Cunningham at Unacast are doing some interesting work surrounding contextualized location data (as is the company Factual). Two other topics I’m following quite closely are AI and voice-as-an-operating-system. At the intersection of those two you’ll find Omar Tawakol building an interesting business at Voicera and its in-meeting AI assistant (he’ll always be a martech alumni!). And while I haven’t seen anyone doing anything breakthrough with blockchain and martech yet, there’s likely to be at least one startup that will harness blockchain technology to solve for fraud in the online advertising industry.

What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2018?

Salesforce (Customer Data Record)
Hubspot (Marketing Automation)
JIRA (Request/Project/Team Management)
Highspot (Uniformity/Consistency of Assets Across the Organization)
Qualtrics (Client Feedback, Consumer Surveys)
Google Analytics (Website and SEM/SEO Analytics)

SundaySky (using our own capabilities to deliver SmartVideo advertising to prospects, as well as SmartVideo for our own CRM initiatives)

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader? How do you leverage AI capabilities at SundaySky?

As a company we’re continually investing in AI to improve our efforts at automating human processes and improving algorithms to optimize our solutions for our customers. As a marketing leader, I encourage my team to go deep in the humanities and what it means to be human as I view AI more like Ironman than like the Terminator. At the World Economic Forum this year, Jack Ma talked about how education needs to change such that we’re not teaching people ‘knowledge’ (which can be easily replicated/surpassed by AI), but rather what it means to be human – the arts, music, etc.

How do you bring together people and technology at one place?

We’re fortunate that our team isn’t geographically distributed, so it’s easy to call together a scrum when necessary. I’m also a little bit old school in that I love whiteboards and use them frequently to sketch out ideas, project plans, checklists, etc.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

I’m looking at the first screen of my iPhone now, which includes:

Google Maps
Spotify
NY Times
Dropbox
LinkedIn
1Password
Concur
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Lyft
Alexa
Harmony (remote)
Hue (Philips Lights)

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Definitely 1Password – a password management app that works across all browsers, operating systems and mobile devices.

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis (a real book with paper!)
Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer by Carmen Bambach (book!)
Principles by Ray Dalio (Kindle edition)
The Terminal List by Jack Carr (written by a friend)

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

I have two:

Rigorous follow-through (attributed to Don Burton)
The phone doesn’t ring on its own – you make it ring (attributed to John Durham)

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Phil Schiller

Thank you Eric! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Eric ” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46f027-27dc”]

As a 4-time CMO of marketing and advertising technology companies, I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the finest marketers in the world, build and scale award-winning teams, and lead one company through its IPO (Rocket Fuel).

I previously was a co-founder of Underscore Marketing, a fully independent, full-service digital marketing and strategy agency launched in 2002. I helped build the team into a recognized Inc 1000 company and expand its presence internationally.

I am also a co-founder of Pericles Consulting, a ‘pop-up’ strategic political marketing firm that developed and executed digital marketing programs for Presidential and Senatorial campaigns across the country.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About SundaySky” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46f027-27dc”]

Sundaysky

SundaySky sits at the intersection of two of the hottest consumer trends today: personalization and video. SundaySky SmartVideo combines the power of personalization with the emotion of sight, sound and motion to deliver personalized storytelling for the digital age. No two SundaySky videos are the same, and we power CRM and advertising solutions for some of the largest brands on the planet, including AT&T, Citibank, The Home Depot, Staples and Verizon.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

TechBytes with Andreas Gnutzmann, Chief Technology Officer, FotoWare

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March 19, 2018

Andreas Gnutzmann
Chief Technology Officer, FotoWare

Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms are transforming the way retail marketers align their strategy around customer experience and brand messaging. According to a recent report, it is speculated that the DAM market would growing at a CAGR of 20.5% from 2017 to 2021. To better understand the state of DAM platforms and their relation with the Content Management Systems (CMS), we spoke to the Chief Technology Officer at FotoWare, Andreas Gnutzmann.

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Tell us about your role at FotoWare and the team/technology you handle.

My background is in Software Product Development and Management. I have a passion for product engineering and design.

As a CTO in FotoWare, I’m responsible for the entire product development lifecycle, from research and design to Quality Assurance. I’m also responsible for the technical support and operational side, which is becoming increasingly important as we transition towards a cloud-based SaaS offering. My team currently consists of 18 people, from five different countries, and we’re constantly increasing the size of our team.

We have always delivered products based on Microsoft Technology, and this relationship continues as we are utilizing more and more PaaS services in Microsoft Azure.

How is FotoWare different from other Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms? How do you measure your benchmarking in the tech industry?

We always have a strong focus on delivering a complete product to our users. Everything in our products needs to work out of the box. We also believe that most of our users are consumers that don’t really want to work in a DAM. They want to work in their content creation tools such as a Web CMS, Office Applications or Adobe CC. We make sure our content can be found and embedded from FotoWare directly through these tools. FotoWare is there to help you as a customer tell your story and express your story visually, and we will never compromise on the quality of these visual elements.

To measure our benchmarking, we stay up to date on market analytics from RealStoryGroup and Gartner. We also do regular competitor analytics and stay up to date on movements from close competitors and big players like Microsoft and Adobe.

One of our core values is to be innovative, and we know that to be innovative, we can’t always look at what everyone else is doing right now – we need to create the tools for tomorrow. By listening to our customers, keeping track on what is going on in the market, and at the same time having an open mind internally, we believe we create the best solutions with the most user-friendly capabilities for our present and future customers.

Do you see a rapid disruption in DAM offerings due to maturity of Content Management Systems (CMS)? How does FotoWare prepare against these disruptions?

We see a trend where the capabilities of the built-in media managers in Content Management Systems extend to the point where they are fully capable Digital Asset Management systems. They can handle a larger amount of media and allow you to organize files better using metadata and taxonomies.

Some Content Management Systems deploy this functionality as modules inside the CMS, while others deploy separate DAM software as a tightly coupled software. Often, this is even the result of a CMS vendor acquiring or merging with a DAM vendor.

In my opinion, there is still a fundamental weakness in this approach. Marketing teams often switch CMS systems or even set up temporary CMS systems for specific products or campaigns. They like to stay on top of new Marketing Automation technology, and often choose different CMS products for different needs. As a result, a company may at any given time own multiple CMS systems from different vendors.

We position our products to be the independent single source for your visual media. Instead of creating tight couplings with specific CMS software, we provide widgets and plugins that can be hooked into any content creator application, including Office Applications, Adobe CC or Web CMS software. The assets are always linked back to FotoWare, ensuring you always have that one up-to-date single source of information, no matter which CMS system you use.

Our own marketing team recently moved our company web page from a proprietary Craft CMS system to Hubspot. The transition took less than 4 weeks to complete. If the CMS had owned our visual assets, it would have been a companywide strategic project which would have taken months to complete. Luckily our digital assets were stored in FotoWare.

How do you leverage content marketing tools to create relevant Product Recommendations and B2B connectivity?

Like many other companies, we are still learning and experimenting with new tools to adapt our marketing strategy to the constantly shifting content landscape.

Meeting our users at their grounds is important for strong connections, that is why we try to engage with and hear how they use the product through Social Media and a dedicated customer portal. Tracking services such as Google Analytics have been essential in the monitoring for user behavior.

We now see that B2B marketing has become more about reaching the right human beings rather than reaching the largest audience.

Of course, at the core of all this, we have FotoWare to maintain our visual assets, ensuring that we always have both up-to-date and historical, product screenshots, videos and promotional elements of feature releases.

Which marketing technologies fascinate you the most?

These days, I have been very impressed by technology that can take some of the guesswork out of the daily marketing work. A/B testing has been helpful in this process, but it still implies that the content must be created first and then tested secondly. And even then, you only prove that one suggestion is better than the other. AI and ML technologies provide exciting solutions to these challenges.

Today I see a lot of specific AI and ML tools and resources emerging that offer solutions to specific challenges, but I’d like to see more end-to-end marketing solutions that utilize these technologies in their products.

One message for 2018-2022 that you want to share with other CTOs in the marketing and sales automation industry:

Pay attention to new technology and always experiment! Big data, AI and Blockchain technology, are all buzzwords we keep hearing these days. We see an increase in tools and services available that offer these technologies. The leaders of tomorrow will be product companies that can utilize these technologies to give added value to their users.

Thanks for chatting with us, Andreas.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Newgen Positioned as a Leader in Cloud-Based Dynamic Case Management by Forrester Research

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March 19, 2018

Newgen Positioned as a Leader in Cloud-Based Dynamic Case Management by Forrester Research

Forrester Wave Report: Newgen Software, Leader in BPM, ECM, and CCM Platforms.

Newgen Software Technologies Limited, a provider of Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Customer Communication Management (CCM) platforms, announced that it has been positioned as a ‘Leader’ in report, The Forrester Wave: Cloud-based Dynamic Case Management (DCM), Q1 2018, authored by Craig Le Clair et al.

According to the report, “Newgen Software shows depth in solution accelerators and intelligent apps.” The report recognizes Newgen as “an aggressive provider of intelligent apps, with more than 150 across 17 verticals, including an appeals and grievances solution for health payer services; contract management; and more than 20 financial services solutions. These apps are separately licensed and released under product management control; they include process templates, form fragments, rules, forms, data model, and task templates. With a broader portfolio than many other DCM vendors, this provider includes ECM, BPM, capture, output management, complex event processing (CEP) event model, and mobile development framework.”

Also Read: Gartner Cites Newgen Software As A ‘Visionary’ In The 2017 Magic Quadrant

“This recognition validates for us, our continuous efforts to drive product innovation as well as enhance the value proposition to our clients. Our endeavor is to facilitate enterprise-wide digital transformation with our platforms,” said Diwakar Nigam, MD & Chairman, Newgen Software.

The report recognizes that “enterprises often choose Newgen for its geographic diversity, with many installations in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific, its strong product features, quality of consultants, ease of implementation, and lower total cost of ownership.”

Also Read: Infosys Research: Digital Disruption is Steering Enterprises from Core Modernization to Delivering Customer Delight

The report also states that “Newgen Software has partnered with UiPath to build RPA bots and will leverage its own process-mining tool to combine bot-based digital workers with case management.” Newgen OmniFlow iBPS framework facilitates Digital Sensing for “text and sentiment analytics against email, Facebook, Twitter, or any content to route casework.” The suite also offers advanced analytics and suggestions tab based on historical case activity.

Using a 23-criteria evaluation of cloud-based DCM market, the research firm identified 11 most significant vendors in the space. Forrester ranked Newgen OmniFlow iBPS Suite 3.1 with the highest scores possible in two criteria – horizontal cross-industry domain support and partner ecosystem. The product has among the top four scores in current offering and top six in strategy, which is two of the three overall categories.

Mojiit Partners with Quan to Bring 3D Augmented Reality to More Than 2 Billion Social Network Users Worldwide

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March 19, 2018

Mojiit Partners with Quan to Bring 3D Augmented Reality to More Than 2 Billion Social Network Users Worldwide

New Partnership Will Expand Mojiit’s Reach, Empower Social Network Users to Enjoy and Share Favorite Quan Games, Characters and Other Content in 3D Augmented Reality

Mojiit, the first augmented reality social platform, announced it has partnered with top Japanese mobile developer Quan to bring Mojiit’s technology across Quan’s content catalog and distribution platforms. Effective immediately, the partnership will broaden Mojiit’s reach to more than 2.3 billion users worldwide and convert all of Quan’s characters to 3D augmented reality for people to share on favorite sites including Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Kik and more.

Also read: Mapbox Launches Global Reality-Grade AR Location Platform

“Quan is the biggest sticker provider in the world. With Mojiit, it can now offer its stickers, games, content, and characters in 3D augmented reality for its global users to enjoy and share. We’re thrilled to provide Mojiit’s technology to the billions of people who use and enjoy Quan products on their favorite sites and social networks,” said Jeremy Greene, CEO, Mojiit.

Greene, a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record in creating and scaling popular social networks, founded Mojiit in 2017 to bring augmented reality and other technologies to the social and mobile web. Mojiit enables users to create 3D avatars of themselves or anyone they want to be, which they can peer-to-peer share with other users as well as leverage content created by peers for their own social expression and experience. With the Quan partnership, Mojiit will expand its reach to a broader, multinational user base and continue to drive the next generation of technology and social networks.

Also Read: Are Marketers Ready for Next-Level Personalization?

Kazuhiro Mizuno

“We are very excited to partner with Mojiit and leverage its technology for our users and platforms,” said Kazuhiro Mizuno, CEO, Quan.

A venture-backed startup, Mojiit has raised $2 million in its seed round and will close its Series A funding in May.

Recommended Read: 3 Innovations Driving Out-of-Home in 2018

MindTickle Appoints Sales Enablement Leader Patrick Lynch As VP

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MTS Staff Writer

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March 19, 2018

Patrick Lynch, an Industry Veteran, Will Lead Efforts to Help Customers Correlate Enablement Programs to Outcomes

MindTickle, a company revolutionizing how businesses prepare and train their sales teams, announced the hiring of Patrick Lynch for the role of Vice President of Enablement Excellence and Innovation. Fitting perfectly into MindTickle’s vision, Lynch’s role is to advocate for the entire practice of sales enablement and to spearhead MindTickle’s effort to drive better outcomes for its customers through innovation and world-class enablement.

Winning By Design Makes Its Sales Content Available On MindTickle — Jules Ehrlich

“This is an exciting time for sales and enablement leaders where technologies like MindTickle are making it possible to correlate the impact of readiness programs with sales performance. However, doing this successfully requires a thoughtful and proven approach. With Pat joining, we are able to bring our customers a perfect combination of field-tested best practices and technology. His deep background of more than 23 years in sales and experience as an industry analyst makes him the perfect fit to help our customers create and deliver effective data-driven enablement,” said Jules Ehrlich, President at MindTickle.

Also Read: TechBytes with Daniel Kuperman, Director Product Marketing, MindTickle

Patrick Lynch

Previously, Lynch served as a Director/Chief Customer Officer at CSO Insights, where he collaborated with some of the most forward-thinking enablement professionals in the industry and helped companies apply best practices in sales enablement and benchmark their results. He also serves as a founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, Denver chapter. Prior to CSO Insights, Lynch was the managing partner for Salesbridge, LLC, a sales transformation consultancy working with Fortune 500 companies.

Lynch served in various executive-level roles over his career, including holding P&L responsibility for all sales and operations for regional and national managed services accounts at Xerox, supporting the national sales team at the Customer Solutions Group at FedEx, and expanding channel sales at Ricoh.

“I have seen first-hand how the very best sales organizations are run and what is unique about their enablement approach,” said Lynch, adding, “Regardless of their technology, great enablement leaders are maniacal about achieving results and correlating enablement initiatives with sales performance. I am excited to join MindTickle, which is leading global organizations towards this goal and understands how to turn this approach into reality.”

Also Read: MindTickle Raises $27 Million in Series B Funding

Vendavo Launches Intelligent CPQ

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March 19, 2018

Vendavo’s New Cloud Solution Brings Advanced Price Optimization Intelligence into Automated Configuration Price Quotation (CPQ) Workflow

In response to growing product complexity, increasing market volatility and ever-stressed margins, Vendavo, a leading provider of commercial excellence solutions, announced the launch of Vendavo Intelligent CPQ Packaged Solution (VICPQ) to ensure sales provides the right offer, to the right customer, at the right price, at the right time.

Also Read: Pricing Optimization Provider Vendavo Acquires Endeavor Commerce

VICPQ, a cloud solution, automates the delivery of pricing intelligence directly into the Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) workflow for greater revenue, maximum margin and improved customer experience with every quote.

“While traditional CPQ solutions can generate faster quotes, they pull from static price lists that fail to incorporate optimized pricing. In today’s high-expectation digital economy, every quote must work harder and with pricing accurately aligned to a customers’ willingness to pay to increase win rates and improve enterprise profitability. Pricing is now an essential ingredient to increasing an organization’s velocity to profit,” said Sean Myers, Senior Vice President, CPQ, Vendavo

In addition to price optimization algorithms, VICPQ also automatically delivers detailed account information into CPQ workflows including what the customer bought, how much they paid and other historical information. Business intelligence alerts have also been baked in to predict potential customer churn risk.

Also Read: Highspot and SalesLoft Push Modern Sales Engagement to a New Level

“Optimized price, historical account detail, and churn prediction may be known by an organization but chances are that information exists in separate silos and isn’t easy for a salesperson to access. Now, sales teams have all of this information at their fingertips, in a CPQ workflow, to shorten the sales quotation cycle from weeks to hours,” said Myers.

Bruno Slosse

According to Gartner, “by 2018, 40% of B2B digital commerce sites will use price optimization algorithms and configure, price and quote tools to dynamically calculate and deliver product pricing.”1 Additionally, “By 2022, more B2B quotes and orders will be created in a CPQ or in e-commerce applications than in ERP.”2 “In today’s digital economy, B2B buyers increasingly compare their buying experience to their last best B2C buying experience and modern businesses must respond,” said Bruno Slosse, President and CEO, Vendavo.

VICPQ is an out of the box integration between Vendavo CPQ Cloud and Vendavo Pricing Guidance Packaged Solution which includes Vendavo Price Optimization Manager, Vendavo Segmentation Manager, Vendavo Business Risk Alerts and Vendavo Profit Analyzer.

Yroo Unveils New Deal AI to Help Shoppers Find the Best-Value Products

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March 18, 2018