Media ad buying is growing at a rapid pace. In order to keep up with the pace of the ad tech market, leading native ad supply solution providers are harbingering on the thought of integrating their offerings with omnichannel programmatic ad integration platforms. That’s exactly what Sharethrough aims to achieve with Adelphic.
Sharethrough, the all-in-one native advertising software for publishers, app developers, and advertisers, announced the integration of its supply-side platform (SSP) with Adelphic, a mobile and omnichannel programmatic ad demand-side platform (DSP).
The decision to integrate with the native programmatic ad platform perfectly aligns with Sharethrough’s immediate business objectives – to take on Facebook in the programmatic ad selling marketplace.
Sharethrough bringing Adelphic into its native advertising strategy aims to empower media buyers with seamless access to in-feed display and video placements across mobile and app sites. For advertisers who used Adelphic’s DSP, the Sharethrough Exchange will be readily available.
For Sharethrough, Adelphic becomes the first DSP that allows third-party buyers to purchase native video placements on the Sharethrough Exchange programmatically. It will comply with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s OpenRTB 2.3 specification, the standard to regularize use of component parts for real-time native ads trading.
Though native advertising is not a new thing for the advertisers, the way consumers experience the brands across various channels of engagement pose a huge challenge them. Mobile advertising is expected to run away with the majority of the ad spend in 2017. Therefore, it becomes all the more important for the advertisers to negotiate through the complexities of consumer experiences and adapt to the changing content experiences across different screens.
Adelphic, the Waltham-based start-up, is known as a key innovator in the mobile and cross-channel ad tech ecosystem, developing patented technologies to overcome challenging customer experience issues. With Adelphic, brands can break down billions of data points along the customer journey, deriving high-value analytics on customers who are most likely to convert.
Sharethrough currently offers a complete series of native ad stack for direct and indirect sales and content promotion. The company has some of the biggest brands in its clientele, including Time Inc, Forbes, and Hearst. Matching steps with Adelphic will enable Sharethrough publishers to switch between omnichannel and people-based marketing platforms seamlessly.
Programmatic ad integration between SSP and DSP will make ad tech more relevant and accurate, finally delivering all the “rights” – user, message, place, time and experience.
NICE Systems, the leading customer experience analytics and business intelligence platform, introduced its latest interaction solution, Nexidia Interaction Analytics. The customer experience management platform announced the new solution following its decision to acquire Nexidia, a leader in provisioning advanced customer analytics. The joint operation between NICE and Nexidia is likely to churn out more martech-centric tools and solutions in the future.
“We are proud to offer the most advanced analytics solution in the market, which encompasses our vision of ‘analytics with no limits,’” said Miki Migdal, President of the NICE Enterprise Product Group.
“Leveraging Nexidia’s leading capabilities, the latest NICE solution offers unparalleled accuracy, scalability, and performance, enabling organizations around the globe to capitalize on the powerful insights from their omnichannel interactions. Infusing analytics into all our solutions is a pivotal strategy for NICE, and the integration of this technology with our WFO suite represents another critical step in reinventing customer service.”
via Nexidia website
Nexidia Interaction Analytics packs in a powerful collection of analytics solutions, designed to drive organizational change and leverage the power of Big Data at scale. The most enticing feature of the new interaction analytics platform is its capability to discover, process and report relevant customer data. Nexidia will continue to provide customer interaction analytics solutions independently even after the acquisition is complete.
Nexidia Interaction Analytics will be powered by the patented technology called Neural Phonetic Speech Analytics™. The technology leverages Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), combining it with phonetic indexing and search methodologies. Built on MapReduce framework, Nexidia Interaction Analytics will be distributed via Nexidia Search Grid™ to achieve seamless scalability with logical uniformity across the system.
“Speech and text analytics are the most effective tools for gaining insight into customers’ and prospects’ opinions, needs and wants,” said Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting LLC.
The solution will enable businesses to reinvent and adapt to the highly dynamic omnichannel customer service ecosystem. Nexidia Analytics is a data-driven customer service solution, delivering accurate, real-time omnichannel analytics based on deep learning neural networks.
via Nexidia website
Marketers can perform a wide range of audio, video and content search across various platforms of interaction with customers –calls, emails, chat messages, and surveys. Once integrated with the existing analytics software, marketers can achieve tangible business success across the enterprise.
“Companies need omnichannel solutions that provide a fully integrated view of customer interactions. It’s essential to know what customers and prospects are doing and saying in all channels, at all times, so that the company can take the right actions and deliver a personalized experience to each individual who reaches out to them.”
Ysance, the provider of people-based marketing platform, has announced the launch of Stories™, a cutting-edge AI-centric marketing engine. The latest AI martech tool will help marketers analyze and influence omnichannel customer journeys. Ysance, founded in 2005, will launch the Stories™ at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show in New York City, January 15-17, 2017.
Marketers have a hard time understanding the kind of experience customers expect from their first interaction with the brand. No matter how good the product is, a poor or even an average customer experience can severely dent the marketing campaign. In an age where every customer is a potential influencer, missing out on customer experience analytics doesn’t harp well on marketing strategies, especially in B2B Saas and social media industries.
“Customer journeys have become staggeringly complex to analyze, let alone to influence. Nevertheless, with offline still accounting for 90% of sales and with digital influencing anything between 60 to 80% of all purchase decisions, it is easy to see why online-to-offline is the new battleground,” says Romain Chaumais, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Ysance.
via Ysance blog
Ysance’s people-based marketing platform provides superior customer recognition to help marketer reinvent the audience qualification metrics across all customer touch points – inbound, outbound, offline, online and in-store. Ysance Stories™ harnesses the potential of artificial intelligence, enabling marketers to respond to the complex online-offline behavior of the customers. The latest AI-driven martech tool will be available immediately for marketers post launch.
“Ysance Stories revolutionizes retail marketing engagement by revealing the story of omnichannel purchase intent in a pipeline view and recommending the next best action. Marketers gain the ability to drive sales based on customer needs and preferences – in context, automatically, and at scale.”
via Ysance blog
Ysance will offer exclusive machine learning and simulation modeling capabilities to measure customer value and expand audience segmentation. Marketers can expect to qualify up to 85% of the full audience volume, engaging them with 1:1 personalized omnichannel interactions. It will also amplify the API library available in the Ysance Marketing Exchange, offering seamless data integration across all leading social media platforms.
As customer attention gets more fragmented due to cross-device interaction, marketers require sophisticated AI-based adtech content personalization and delivery tool to keep up with the vagrant behavior of modern customers. Ysance Stories, more or less, empowers marketers to reveal connections with audiences – wherever they are.
Marketers can now manage their brand reputation with better effectiveness than ever before. Signet Research, Inc., a leading New Jersey-based marketing research firm specializing in media research, introduced the Net Promoter Score (NPS®) software called Sibyl™ for B2B businesses, media companies and brand marketers.
Sibyl™ is designed to provide media companies with critical sagacity on how their brands and services are faring among the customers. It will help B2B marketers optimize their campaigns to retain and expand their clientele. Sibyl™ is aimed at helping businesses reach the pinnacle of customer loyalty in the competitive SaaS marketplace.
Currently, Sibyl is the solitary NPS platform for B2B media companies, SaaS solution provider, and marketers, delivering them real-time data and predictive analytics to realize effective client growth potential.
How the NPS® Software works?
The NPS software developed by Signet Research is an industry-approved widely used to measure customer satisfaction. It is adopted to derive high response rates from the customers, which in return is used to make accurate predictions on brand growth and churn.
“The idea for Sibyl™ originated from our clients’ interest in a turn-key customer satisfaction tool that not only allows them to react quickly to customer feedback but was customizable to their business needs,” explains Joanna Zanopoulo, President of Signet Research. ”
The NPS® software differentiates the customer as “Promoters”, “Passives”, and “Detractors” depending on the response to the question –
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or colleague?”
Responses 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, and responders between 0-6 are detractors.
Sibyl™ calculates the NPS for a particular brand based on the difference between the percentage of “Promoters” and the percentage of “Detractors”.
“The beauty of Sibyl™ is in its custom question follow-up functionality,” affirms Joanna Zanopoulo. “A score in itself doesn’t mean much without explanation. We want businesses to understand the ‘whys’ behind a customer’s NPS® score so they can look at their customer relationships more strategically.”
We built Sibyl™ with that notion in mind, and created an easy-to-use software package that has a great deal of flexibility in gathering and reporting data while staying true to delivering reliable satisfaction metrics.”
Features of Sibyl
Adaptable interactive dashboard with easy-to-view analytics, NPS score and market trends
Custom notifications and alerts triggered by customer action
Optimized survey throttling with anti-fatigue rules
Data exporting streams with filtered results
Intuitive filtering engine with customized client interaction
Platform optimization with CRM compatibility and management tools integration
Campaign segmentation with multiple engagement options – email, the web, mobile, apps, SMS/MMS
Sibyl™ NPS® Software enables the brand marketers to identify and respond to unsatisfied customers and the indifferent ones before they can influence the marketing campaigns negatively. The NPS® software also accelerates the marketing efforts by optimizing promotion and enhancing customer allegiance.
CaliberMind, a Colorado-based predictive B2B marketing SaaS platform, has merged its solutions with Terminus Cloud for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) program. CaliberMind offers Persona Builder modules appended into existing CRM and marketing automation platforms. The customer journey orchestration platform will fit into the ABM stack, enabling marketers to track buying signals and handle the complexities of sales acceleration along the B2B buyer’s journey.
CaliberMind B2B marketing SAAS platform can be integrated with marketing automation and CRM systems provided by Marketo, Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua and The Big Willow, Inc.
Marketers can evaluate the efficacy of their marketing stacks and fuse technology capabilities with the ABM strategy. Terminus Cloud for ABM helps marketers build their ABM stack by grouping them into the following categories –
Identify
Expand
Engage
Advocate
Measure
CaliberMind joined Terminus Cloud for ABM as part of an invite-only program designed. The program is designed to empower marketers with an array of web-based tools supporting ABM strategies at scale. Meanwhile, Terminus also released the ABM Stack Grader to help marketers navigate the Account-based Marketing technology landscape with better clarity and proficiency.
“Taking an account-based approach is the first step in transitioning from a product to a customer-centric organization but you can’t just stop at the account level, you have to better understand the individual buyers and the buying team so you can create personal and relevant content that supports your buyers in their decision journey,” said, Raviv Turner, CEO of CaliberMind.
“CRMs were not built to track buying signals, and rule-based Marketing Automation Platforms can no longer handle the complexity of the modern B2B buyer’s journey. A machine powered, customer-data-platform that can plug-in and provide a single view of your buyers across their entire decision journey is the foundation of any effective ABM strategy.”
via CaliberMind website
CaliberMind makes CRM framework more actionable by utilizing cutting-edge B2B buyer intelligence software, making marketing stacks more human-centric and profitable. The marketing persona builder platform also enables marketers to analyze account data based on customer profiles.
CRM, behavioral analytics and social media intelligence tools integrated with Terminus Cloud for ABM provide a complete picture on level of influence, engagement, and effectiveness of personalized marketing campaigns.
Tracking First, a Utah-based adtech start-up that validates and manages full-range of online marketing campaigns announced promotion of John Boyd to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO). Additionally, Tracking First also announced its hiring of Craig Monson as Vice President- Sales. Monson is replacing John Boyd. Monson brings with him an enriching experience from SaaS, digital analytics, sales acceleration and business intelligence among other skills.
Craig Monson has previously worked as Enterprise Account Executive for Numetric and as Enterprise Sales Director for InsideSales.com. At Tracking First, Monson’s experience at Omniture, an Adobe Company will come handy. Monson will look after staffing, sales acceleration, and management departments.
As a data governance and data validation company, Tracking First is likely to proliferate deeper into online marketing and sales automation platforms.
via Tracking First website
“We’re at a point where we need to scale our growth, and it’s great to have experienced minds on the team,” explained Craig Scribner, CEO of Tracking First. Craig Monson added, “There is an entrepreneurial spirit that draws me to a company like Tracking First. It’s a maverick get-up-and-do-it mindset that really suits me. The fact that it’s a role in analytics and big data is comfortable — I’ve worked in other industries, but I like this sector, it’s one I know,”
“Tracking First’s technology is a huge boost to teams of marketers and analysts working jointly on campaigns,” adds John Boyd. “We have a great roster of Fortune 500 clients, and we’re looking for growth this year.”
Instapage, the leading landing personalized page platform, will now be available with Marketo automation software. The integration with Marketo, Inc. will enable marketers to design fully personalized landing pages with advanced design features. Instapage landing pages can be seamlessly integrated with existing Marketo software, driving higher ROI for marketing campaigns.
On-Brand Experience comes to Marketo
Instapage-Marketo integration spells a new beginning in the personalized customer experience along the brand journey. Marketers can now offer highly interactive personalized landing pages to targeted audience based on leads generated from Marketo database. Instapage offers on-brand testing and optimizing capabilities for brands to review their personalized campaigns centered on landing pages.
Integration with Instapage brings Marketo users wide-ranging benefits –
Build hyper-personalized landing pages for desktop, mobile, and apps
Induce variations in landing page at scale using A/B testing capabilities
Reduce time and cost of creating and publishing landing pages
End launch delays caused due to mismanagement of landing page operations
Enhance customer experience, drive higher ROI
Tyson Quick, founder and CEO of Instapage, said, “We saw an opportunity where marketers could significantly increase their ROI. “By sending customers to a personalized landing page and have those leads pushed into their marketing platform for further lead nurturing, you’re truly maximizing your advertising and marketing dollars.”
Instapage Integration with Marketo in One Go
For Marketo users, Instapage offers quick set-up screen, thus saving valuable time and effort during integration. For pages with more than one CTAs and two-step opt-in forms, users have to perform multiple Marketo integrations.
Marketers using Instapage to personalize landing pages will get a mapping feature to match their Marketo fields. Leads generated from Instpage landing pages will stream into Marketo database, enabling Marketo clients to automate their post-conversion customer journey. It is a wonderful synergy between customer experience and post-conversion marketing available within Marketo.
“We’re always looking to expand the options available to our customers,” said Andy Choi, Senior Director of Business Development, Marketo. “This integration with Instapage provides the flexibility to build the best-of-breed marketing stack. Now, the process of acquiring and nurturing leads is seamless for marketers.”
Instapage currently offers seamless integration with more than 20 leading marketing software suites. By partnering with Marketo, Instapage aims at enabling marketers to personalize email campaigns, social media and app-based invites. Marketo is a critical value addition to Instapage’s building and testing platform.
Instapage landing page personalization services are offered on a free trial for 30 days for first-time users. Users can design landing pages using exciting templates for different campaigns – Lead generation, Two-step invite, Click through, Thank you, Webinar, E-book, Event, and App. The landing pages are optimized for desktop and mobile based on user’s selection.
For third party users, Instapage is hosting a Marketo Integration Webinar on January 12, 2017.
Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., the New Jersey-based B2B data provisioning company, announced its acquisition of Avention, the maker of OneSource® solutions. The acquisition makes Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) a commanding force in the Sales Acceleration market, enabling marketing and research teams to improve user engagement, enhance adoption and productivity, and improve overall business strategy.
Avention’s OneSource® solutions offer organizations a clear insight into customer database and market analytics, brought together through an agile technology platform. D&B acquiring Avention redefines the company’s objective to provide Sales and Marketing professionals with an accurate actionable market and business information, filtered by software.
Avention can be plugged into third-party CRM and marketing automation systems, helping marketers to leverage real-time data insights and sales intelligence placed delivered with an intuitive interface. Users can work with actionable data based on mission-critical importance.
Sales Acceleration refers to the process by virtue of which the sales team increases its velocity by including methods like data visualization and business intelligence. It is based on delivering refined information to sales teams, empowering them to make updated strategies, connecting it with buying signals. The Sales Acceleration marketing is currently evaluated at $10 billion, according to Outshell, Inc.
“The Sales Acceleration space offers a big opportunity for Dun & Bradstreet. We believe as the global leader in commercial information we are well positioned to take market share and accelerate our growth strategy,” said Bob Carrigan, chairman and chief executive officer of Dun & Bradstreet. “Bolstered by the success of our recent M&A activity, which has exceeded its acquisition economics, we will continue to explore smart, tuck-in acquisitions that, combined with disciplined execution, will help us to further expand our leadership in this category as well as other areas of our business.”
“We are excited to combine our world-class company and contact data with Avention’s best-in-class technology that is fully integrated with the leading software platforms utilized by B2B sales professionals and marketers,” said Josh Peirez, president and chief operating officer of Dun & Bradstreet. “Avention is a natural fit that will allow us to deliver tremendous value to customers, and the synergies we can capture put the value of this deal well above the purchase price of the acquisition.”
D&B-Avention formulation will provide a tremendous push to the existing Traditional Prospecting offerings delivered through the acquired company’s cutting-edge software suite. The combination is capable of serving critical B2B sales and marketing demands leveraging Dun & Bradstreet’s Sales Acceleration product portfolio. The portfolio includes Hoover’s, Avention, NetProspex, and Strategic Alliance. In totality, the combined package of these products generated more than $200 million in 2016.
Monetate, the leading personalization and customer experience management platform, is moving its corporate headquarters to New York. The decision unveils the company’s determination to get closer to growing concentration of clients, especially in enterprise software, retail, and fashion industries. Monetate currently provides SaaS, powering multi-channel personalization for world’s leading brands. This is the first of many strategic moves made by the company towards expanding their business visibility in the US.
Monetate offers five distinct products for marketers and advertisers, enabling them to translate a wide array of customer data into personalization-driven actions across channels and devices. Monetate for Personalization, Monetate for Optimization and Monetate for Mobile Apps help in creating segment-centric customer experiences based on data-rich analytics extracted from existing CRM and POS.
Monetate also offers email personalization platform with cross-channel and widget inventory capabilities. Shifting its headquarters to New York is expected to refine Monetate’s Dynamic Testing product, delivering real-time personalization on auto-pilot mode.
Monetate’s New York headquarters will house client-centric business functions, including sales and services staff, executive and others. Top management will shuttle between their current Pennsylvania-based headquarters and New York till mid-2017. Founded by David Brussin and David Bookspan in 2008, the company also has offices in Palo Alto and London.
In 2008, Monetate raised $600,000 as seed funding from First Round Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. In December 2008, it raised $5.1 million in Series A funding, followed by $15 million Series B funding in August 2011. In February 2013, Monetate raised $17.3 million Series C funding, followed by $8 million in the same year. Investors like OpenView Venture Partners, Common Fund, First Round Capital, FLOODGATE and Lead Edge Capital have significant stakes in the company.
Lucinda Duncalfe, CEO of Monetate, is upbeat about the growing prominence of her company in marketing technology sector. As a leader in the IR500 in the US and Europe, it was an obvious decision for Monetate to expand their business horizon, taking their corporate headquarters to the financial epicenter of the world. Backed by continued growth in provisioning cutting-edge personalization experiences, Monetate is gearing up for an exciting year ahead, getting closer to their existing clients and forging new relation with the prospective ones.
Choozle, the Denver, Colorado-based real-time programmatic advertising platform, announced itself as the fastest growing self-service digital marketing and advertising company. In one year, its revenue has tripled, contributed largely by continued innovation in its core product offering. Choozle also landed additional A-1 funding of $2.4 million from its investors in 2017. It adds to the $4.6 million Choozle raised in 2015, led by Great Oaks Venture Capital and other existing investors.
Choozle has raised $8.6 million so far, and has 30 employees.
Choozle offers adtech software to power real-time advertising campaigns across display, mobile, and social channels. Backed by the latest funding, the adtech SaaS platform will expand its operations in the US, and grow internationally. Choozle’s 4th quarter profit in 2016 has proved that the company is on a hyper-growth track despite the tough market conditions in the US. Its customer reach grew by 175 percent.
Programmatic advertising industry is currently worth $40 billion. Choozle aims to grow its product innovation and expand in the US and abroad to repeat its success in 2017. The adtech start-up offers SaaS served on ad networks of theTradeDesk, AOL, Rubicon, MOAT, Bluekai, Google Display Network, Yahoo, MoPub, OpenX, DoubleClick, AppNexus, Sizmek and Facebook. It has 300+ clients all over the world, including Digital First Media, Paradise Agency, Watauga, and Ibotta.
A study on programmatic advertising reports that only 18 percent marketers in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom have been using the technology for more than 2 years. Programmatic ad spending in the US is expected to grow 17.6 billion in 2018. While the ad spending in programmatic advertising continues to grow rapidly, venture investment in the sector has saturated to a large extent.
In 2016, investments in programmatic ad industry fell by 33 percent. For most adtech companies, it was a struggle to keep pace with the competition and achieve profitability, apart from securing investments. Choozle managed to adapt itself and grow its clientele span beyond 1,000 advertisers.
Andrew Fischer, cofounder and CEO of Choozle, emphasized on company’s focus on continuing his company’s heritage of developing intuitive self-service design in 2017. Choozle ranked #1 in the Customer Satisfaction in G2Crowd’s Winter 2016 Digital Advertising report.
Cloud-based SaaS platform AdGreetz launched a fully personalized video corporate website, AdGeetz.com. It is world’s first personalized video website that offers seamless access via Facebook Connect or user data. The website enables marketers to view and personalize their marketing campaigns for diverse brands on a single screen.
AdGreetz website is offering integration with popular social media and digital media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and OTT/Television. It also enables marketers to partner with leading brands for running hyper-personalized ad campaigns, engaging customers across all video advertising platforms. AdGreetz website is an alluring opportunity for marketers, brands, and influencers to get more personal with their audiences with an expansive range of capabilities.
To see what AdGreetz does, the user has to log in with the Facebook profile. The user can then explore the full scope of personalization possible in ad campaigns. At any point of engagement on AdGreetz.com, the user is free to engage with the videos published by previous clients and analyze possibilities of personalization. AdGreetz offers end-to-end SaaS platform capabilities to the user, opening possibilities to create engaging and smarter medium to communicate with consumers based on 1:1 interactivity.
Currently, the website features AdGreetz’s collaboration with brands including Amazon, InterContinental Hotel Group, Disney, Toyota, Google, Forever 21, HBO, Etihad Airways and West Elm. Given the wide range of branding channels available to marketers, leveraging SaaS-powered personalized website platform is a high-ROI opportunity in 2017.
Video advertising in 2017 is expected to generate more than $10 billion. By 2020, this figure will climb to $28 billion. This makes video advertising as the fastest growing martech element on web and app. AdGreetz’s personalized video corporate website is a smooth platform to boost video ad sales and drive more click-through rates and conversion rates with further personalization in the marketing stack.
Accenture has acquired Altitude, a Boston-based design, and innovation consulting firm. The latest acquisition will enable Accenture to leverage Altitude’s years of experience in curating innovative products and experiences that resonate with wide range of customers, both B2C and B2B.
Altitude is known as an award-winning product developer, integrating the fine nuances of technology, design and customer experience together. Over the course of time, Altitude has helped its customers turn novel technology into a cutting-edge product. Altitude at Accenture will play a big role in unifying Accenture’s Connected Product Lifecycle Services practice in North America to rest of its technology research. It will enable researchers and product developers to create innovative capabilities for companies working on IoT, AI, automation and other business models with high-growth revenue streams.
Accenture acquired Altitude to enhance its market visibility in contemporary digital technology domains, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). Altitude brings its far-reaching product innovation into Accenture’s power-packed consulting expertise. Accenture intends to offer connected products in a hyper-personalized marketplace to its customers.
We acquired product design and innovation co @Altitude_Inc enhancing our ability to help companies harness the #IoT. https://t.co/0rftfC8uoy
The Altitude team will join Accenture workforce at the Connected Products Studio in Boston – an emerging technology hub for IoT, AI and other martech innovations.
According to Accenture’s research on use of IoT in business strategies, 73% companies are yet to include IoT in their investment budgets. Apart from driving long-term growth for businesses, IoT market is pegged to become a very stable service-based income stream. IoT as a disruptive technology is redefining the model of product-based business models.
Rapid growth of wearables, VR, AI and chat bots are forcing marketers to explore strategic martech innovations to drive their campaigns. Accenture’s Altitude acquisition adds more weight to the company’s mission to provide end-to-end capabilities to its clients, enabling them to become disruptors and innovators quickly at much lesser failure risk.
YuMe Inc., a multi-screen video adtech company, released the latest infographic-report on consumer experience towards immersive ad formats. The report reveals the attitude of consumers towards immersive ads published on mobile Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and 360-degree video formats. The survey results highlight the fact that consumers are hyper-engaged and super-attentive with immersive advertising. Consumers who have experienced adtech like VR consider the format as a revolutionary platform to engage customers. Nearly 63% of the VR ad viewers accept that marketers should use these technologies more effectively, as it is the “next big thing” of advertising.
via YuMe, Inc.
Immersive technologies in advertising encourage marketers and brands to analyze consumer’s perception towards VR, AR and 360-degree videos. 51% consumers are more likely to get attracted to a brand that uses VR to promote its services owing to its innovation-centric strategy. Brands that embrace immersive technologies are considered more innovative than those who don’t use them. Hence, consumers are more inclined to pay extra attention to their ads.
According to the report, immersive technology is not a disruptive adtech. Instead, it is a trending, mass-market category that almost 89% of consumers are aware of. 29% of such consumers have even tried VR, AR and 360-degree video ad formats at least once. VR, undoubtedly, is the most well-known and most readily recognized immersive technology, followed by 360-degree video and then AR. Comparing the stat results between VR and 360-degree video, almost half the respondents feel that the former immersive technology will play a bigger role in providing sponsored content.
Early adoption holds the key for brands deploying immersive technologies. More than 50% consumers believe that both VR and 360-degree videos help create engaging customer experiences.
As consumers begin to fall out of love with native advertising formats, the latest study on the role of immersive technology in advertising is a shot in the arm. Ad blocking notwithstanding, immersive technologies have the potential to build enormous opportunities for brands to engage consumers in an unprecedented way.
Video survey specialist Voxpopme has announced its partnership with Affectiva, the leading emotion measurement technology company. Marketers can now extract key insights from their research campaigns using video snippets with enhanced emotional analytics. Affectiva’s Emotion AI software will now be available with Voxpopme video insight platform. It will enable marketers to meticulously analyze facial expressions within videos, converting it into powerful emotion data. Users of Voxpopme’s video insight platform can leverage video-emotion data to quantify human expressions during video feedback.
Voxpopme offers a readily available video research platform that can be accessed and scaled easily. Complementing Voxpopme’s swift video insight, Affectiva’s patented Emotion AI technology will deliver emotion metrics and bionic data based on facial expressions revealed across multiple research projects.
Voxpopme’s partnership with Affectiva is a significant step towards technology-powered video research. As millions of videos are streamed per day across all video and social media platforms, this collaboration will make it easier for researchers to identify high-value consumers and their behavior towards video ads.
The prospect of Voxpopme and Affectiva integration brings facial coding into prominence in understanding unfiltered responses by consumers. Affectiva’s Emotion AI is built on cutting-edge Deep Learning concept which has analyzed 4,824,543 faces so far, allowing researchers to derive unique insights from their video ad campaigns with the highest precision.
Emotion AI and facial coding can transform martech landscape in 2017
Affectiva is the only marketing-centric Emotion AI solution provider. In fact, it offers Emotion as a Service to marketers, who use the data to measure emotion-enabled online customer experiences. Based on advanced emotion analytics, marketers can integrate the emotion data with their existing data platforms to derive high-value customer experience feedbacks.
Reports suggest how consumers react differently to various ad channels. The same consumer may show higher engagement with video content compared to others. Facial coding in video ads can unlock a plethora of opportunities for marketers to study how consumers during the decision-making processes.
Affectiva introduced Emotion as a Service in September 2015 with an idea to revolutionize emotion-sensing and consumer analytics capabilities, yielding accurate results at a very low operational cost. By partnering with Voxpopme, Affectiva has managed to achieve much of its objective, ensuring marketers have accesses to Emotion AI at a low cost of integration.
Video advertising will flood Facebook very soon. 2017 will see the arrival of Facebook mid-roll ads. After Facebook introduced mid-video ads for Live broadcasts, it is now ruminating about letting publishers insert ads in non-Live videos too. The idea is still in its testing stage.
By monetizing its video sharing and streaming platform, Facebook is planning to become the “king of video content” in 2017. According to credible sources in video advertising industry Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wants users to watch more ads while streaming videos. The latest mid-video ads will enable ad publishers to leverage world’s most popular social media network, opening up a virgin revenue channel. Currently referred to as “mid-roll” ad unit, the publishers can insert a mini ad clip anywhere in the video. Ad length could be anywhere between 15 seconds and 90 seconds.
According to a verified industry source, the Facebook mid-roll ads will pop up once the user has finished watching the video for 20 seconds. Facebook will sell the ads, and in return get 45% revenue share from the publishers. Currently, YouTube also allows publishers to post ads with online videos. Even the split-share revenue models are similar between Facebook and YouTube.
Once the new mid-video ads on Facebook turn into reality, it will represent the first concrete step towards enabling publishers to run monetized video ad campaigns. Facebook acknowledged the power of video content in January 2016. According to a report on Facebook’s Q3 earnings in 2015, users spent watching 100 million video-hours per day. With new mid-roll ads, more video consumption automatically translates into more video advertising.
Facebook may not replace TV ads altogether; instead, it will offer a second-screen experience, playing cross-chairs with YouTube ads. The biggest impact of the latest mid-roll ad unit will be seen from News Feeds that primarily drive the video content distribution mechanism on Facebook.
From customer experience POV, Facebook has no plans to run pre-video ads. Moreover, only those ads will be given “video realty” that can capture viewer’s attention for a longer time. In short, Facebook wants publishers to make creative ads that are long enough to capture user’s attention. More videos, more revenue for Facebook – 2017 is going to be a video advertising revolution.
Wait, till Snapchat too comes up with a similar inviting platform for ad publishers.
Atlassian announced today that it acquired popular team collaboration software company, Trello for $425 million. The 18th acquisition in 14 years for the company that went public in 2015, it’s Atlassian’s largest acquisition to date. Atlassian is paying about $360 million in cash and the remainder in stock, the company said.
Trello launched five years ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Over the past five years, Trello has grown to over 19 million registered users by solving an important problem: capturing and adding structure to fluid, fast-forming work.
The company’s idea was to take the paradigm of a sticky note on a wall and turn it into a tool that allowed people to collaborate in real time.
President Jay Simons says Trello shared Atlassian’s mission of wanting to reach 100 million monthly active users in offices worldwide. “We are a perfect home for them, because we are a company that stands for the same thing that they also care about, which is teams,” Simons said. “From our perspective, what’s exciting about them is it’s a breakout product that’s been incredibly successful.”
Trello is used by single family members to the world’s largest enterprises like Google, National Geographic, the United Kingdom’s government, the United Nations and the Red Cross.
The merger means users can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat, Confluence and JIRA.
Atlassian’s Q2 report on January 19th should shed some more light on the acquisition and how Trello will be integrated with its services.
“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is — it is what consumers tell each other it is.” – Scott Cook, founder and CEO of Intuit.
When consumers turn into your influencers, it is a boon towards generating more output from your marketing efforts. Influencer marketing is a definitive trend on the rise acknowledged by top marketers. Traditionally used by consumer brands to tell their brand stories, marketers adopting influencers for B2B promotion is a recent phenomenon. For valuable lead generation and sales conversion, marketers take the notch one rung higher, introducing – “B2B Influencer Marketing”.
Between 2014 and 2016, influencer marketing emerged as one of the most powerful marketing strategies, especially from the viewpoints of content syndication and social recommendations.
In 2017, CMOs are expected to raise their B2B influencer marketing budgets to secure a broader set of corporate objectives. While most marketers still prefer to stay away from influencers, its relevance in marketing technology stack can’t be overlooked anymore. It’s time to build-up to one of the most forward-thinking marketing technology in 2017. Why?
Because influencer marketing will be the command center for marketers to leverage social monitoring and interactive content platforms.
B2B Influencer Marketing: Evaluating the Trust Factor
Influencer marketing may have rocketed as one of the most credible brand promotion platforms, but there still lies a huge gap between its implementation and ROI evaluation. As marketers look for intelligent tools to drive their social media campaigns and engage the audience with interactive content, influencer marketing is all about choosing the right pilot for the free skies.
Here’s what Influencer Marketing is set out to achieve in 2017.
Amplified content distribution with paid influencing
Influencer marketing is a credible facet of word-of-mouth marketing. Content distribution is one of the most overlooked segments of digital marketing campaigns. Adding influencers as a medium of content distribution really helps drive paid campaigns — SEO, PPC, native advertisements, video, and email. Through people (influencers), marketers can amplify their brand reach using an existing content platform that has already been invested in.
Micro-level influencing
Native advertising, account based marketing, hyper-personalization, and content automation may all seem attractive and unflinchingly hot topics to explore in marketing strategies, deploying Influencer Marketing invariably drives more audience engagement. For niche products and services, customers are 82% more likely to trust the micro influencer recommendations and reviews about the brand than those using social celebrity (macro influencers).
@markfidelman/ Twitter
As influencers create their own content and drivers, they gradually become the creative pillars of the brand, buying a steady stream of highly engaged, hyper-attentive social media users.
Local-to-global activation
Marketing campaigns are growing organically from the local grassroots to evolve into a global phenomenon. Influencers – key managers of local community relationships drive local-to-global magnification. They allow marketers to penetrate niche markets with a very customer-friendly mentality, delivering high impact along with resonating brand engagement.
Omnichannel brand engagement
Blog-only content remains the top platform for engaging audiences across the web, mobile and social. Live messaging, video interaction and even email syndication are steadily replacing blog-only interactions. Influencers are developing independent cross-channel content with interactions, delivering a nice brand-specific social marketing mix. Marketers attest to the importance of content quality as much as its distribution channel.
Ditch self-promotion; avoid brand clash
Two brands may tell the same story and pitch the same set of benefits. Influencers are ice-breakers, raconteurs, and endorsers, all rolled into one. Brand loyalty arrives when marketers ditch self-promotion activities and mindfully avoid the brand-clash with competitors.
Cutting through the native self-promotion gambit can generate higher mileage from social media campaigns. Influencer marketing offers massive content value up-front by investing in real-life experiences.
Live feeds, social messaging and emails with hyper-personalized 1:1 audience engagement helps build stronger and more trustworthy relationships. Influencer marketing is a definitive step towards this.
Dodge past the ad blockers
Ad blockers—the biggest threat to advertisers. There are two ways of circumventing ad blockers. The first option is to deploy an ad blocking detector and wait for the customer to turn off the blocker. Left to chance, most marketers miss out on generating returns from their content despite a flawless distribution platform.
The second option is to create visually attractive ads. Again, a costly effort considering the creative resources that go into it. Therefore, influencer marketing becomes a reliable solution to circumvent ad blocking systems at fraction of the cost that goes into creating interactive ads or in deploying ad blocking detectors.
Influencers are creators and publishers of their own content. This encourages audiences to experience ad content as a genuine voice of the influencer. It’s not marketing trickery; just well-received guidance.
Build a diverse native SEO-driven profile
SEO is still the most important element of content development. Influencers with high-authority domains generate organic backlinks with high “shareable quotient”, which in return improves your link profile. Marketers leveraging influencer marketing can significantly quash negative brand experiences with credible high-authority content and follower messages.
Influencer marketing is perfect for building and boosting SEO efforts at lower costs.
Quick attribution
B2B buyers are more likely to buy a service or product from a marketplace based on referrals over direct promotions. One of the major factors pushing influencers to the top marketing funnel is its quick, reliable attribution. By integrating legacy CRMs with influencer marketing, marketers can accurately measure the relevance of opinion leaders on campaigns and the resultant conversion.
Cons of Influencer Marketing
Where do marketers mostly go wrong with their influencer marketing strategies? Marketers, who have burnt their hands with influencers, acknowledge why it is so hard to get the right marketing mix with them.
Lack of accountability kills reputation
One of the biggest pitfalls is the lack of influencer accountability. It is very hard to tell if the influencer is an endorser or a genuine user, based on the content. 2016 showed how “Fake News” made headlines and broke brand propriety with callous returns. It’s challenging to generate new ideas every time with limited angles to promote brands across various platforms.
Lack of qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure influencer legitimacy makes it harder to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Without accountability, influencer marketing is a hollow strategy.
Influencers are real people, not commodities
Types of influencers
Influencers can’t magically grow a brand into something worth talking about. Marketers should be ready to brainstorm with the influencers about the product and invest in their networks. Authentic brand-audience engagement starts with genuine human interaction that only influencers can provide.
Missing out on journalistic, data-rich content
B2B marketers can do so much more with influencer marketing only if they encourage their assets to provide data-rich, well-researched content with a journalistic perspective. With enough on the analytics dashboard for marketers, influencers can leverage the analytics, connect dots and create experiences for customers that turn to actions.
Overlooking automation in influencer marketing
Automation in influencer marketing is the missing cog in contemporary marketing stack. Creating bespoke content and acquiring self-service platforms to drive that content is a hefty expense. Before implementing influencer marketing get your ducks in a row. One of them is to follow the FTC Endorsement Rules. Automation enables marketers to identify relevant FTC-endorsed influencers and acquire mass-trending content from them.
To turn efforts into sales results, marketers need to empower influencer content with marketing automation with the right mix of self-service platforms and turnkey performance optimizers. By funding live engagement opportunities to influencers, marketers can open up a wide spectrum of pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase data. Automation in influencer marketing can maximize the content’s reach with highly optimized distribution.
Taking the High Road with Influencer Marketing
The biggest mistake you can do with influencer marketing is not do it all!
Influencer marketing can drive overall business strategy, fitting in not just as part of the content strategy, but also as social, PR, and mass engagement strategies. Add to it the features of cognitive marketing technology and voila, you can reinvent omnichannel lead generation. Backed by a strong collaboration with marketers and 24/7 interaction with customers, influencer marketing is all set to become the most reliable brand validation marketing technology.
Salesforce, the leading CRM firm, has released its Second Annual State of Service research report, uncovering insights from more than 2,500 customer service professionals. The latest Salesforce report highlights the impact of smart technologies on service protocols and marketing response towards meeting inflated customer requirements.
According to Salesforce’s Second Annual State of Service Report, it requires a unified platform to deliver smart customer experience across the enterprise. Executives wielding the right tools, backed by suitable training on the customer experience platform can help in elevating the customer-brand interaction. The Salesforce report also highlights the role of artificial intelligence in delivering smart customer experience in future.
Customers across the world are super-connected and hyper-informed than ever before. The digitally-enabled consumers are far more enabled and engaged. Over 82% of them acknowledge that technology makes business easier and seamless. Customer experience – a direct indicator of brand loyalty, provides a stable platform to rise above the competition once technology comes into the picture. Once a costly and reactionary aspect, customer experience is now a key business differentiator powering critical industry transformation.
Why customer experience matters?
Collaborative customer experience boosts omnichannel and upselling opportunities, delivering consistent and efficient interaction.
According to the latest study, 78% of the customer service teams attribute an employee as an agent of customer service. 63% of the service teams rely on a formal methodology to collaborate with their sales counterparts, and almost the same percentage of service teams proactively contribute with sales intelligence. 59% of the service agents feel empowered to create add-ons and orders utilizing CRM with cross-team collaboration.
Overall, service has the highest impact on how customers actually perceive their brand.
Customer experience from agents POV
Top service teams driving high-quality customer service are empowered with the right tool and technology. With adequate training, they gain a single view of the customer life cycle. 360-degree perspective on the customer enhances agent productivity. 79% of the service agents agree about the consistency and continuity in customer interaction. Service teams are adapting to the real-time demands of consumers and business buyers. Service agents are themselves confident about continuing in the same company one year from now, reaping the long-term benefit of consistent customer experience.
Analytics are the magic wands for customer service agents. In 2015-2016, the use of service analytics has spiked up by 166 percent. According to Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM of Sales and Service Clouds, Salesforce, customer experience is the critical differentiator for business growth.
Companies that don’t prioritize customer experience run the risk of falling behind the growth curve. After all, customer experience empowers service agents to offer personalized intelligent and conversational service seamlessly across the entire organization.
FinancialForce, an enterprise cloud-based resource planning company, named its new CEO after its Founder-CEO stepped down on Friday. In a surprise move, CEO Jeremy Roche will make way for enterprise cloud specialist Tod Nielsen, the former CEO of Heroku and COO of VMWare. This is a strategic move to acquire more scalability for FinancialForce, considering Nielsen’s reputation as a platform game maker.
Tod Nielsen’s arrival will boost growth for FinancialForce, which is expected to touch $100 million as annual revenue in coming quarters. Meanwhile, there has been no official comment on Jeremy Roche’s future at FinancialForce. He is expected to serve as a special board advisor.
Tod Nielsen’s appointment as the CEO of FinancialForce comes merely 18 months after the Cloud ERP solution provider raised $110 million in funding. It has acquired close to $200 million so far and is currently evaluated at $530 million. Nielsen’s experience with Salesforce cloud platform will prove to be a huge advantage for FinancialForce.
Previously, Nielsen was the EVP Platform (App Cloud) at Salesforce, partner of FinancialForce on its Cloud ERP. Interestingly, Nielsen was appointed CEO of Heroku after it was acquired by Salesforce, apart from piloting a project to integrate Force and Heroku operations.
According to a leading business source, FinancialForce management decided to shake up the top order as a strategic move to gain market mileage from the current enterprise Cloud ERP segment. While its relationship with Salesforce will remain “symbiotic”, the new CEO at the helm of things will power new innovations and customer-centric development in Cloud ERP models. Roche decided to step down proactively to open new doors for someone with extensive experience in raising cloud models from the scratch.
In an interview with CNBC in October 2016, Jeremy Roche had expressed his desire to take FinancialForce to a new height. He wanted to build a “new Oracle or SAP”. Instead of relying on Salesforce’s AppExchange platform, which is a fee-based app installation marketplace, FinancialForce could be developing and supplying its own Cloud ERP suite independently.
Tod Nielsen at FinancialForce could lead to a clear disruption in the rather “calm” legacy enterprise ecosystem. From a partner to a competitor, FinancialForce’s long-term ambition is to grow beyond Salesforce and shed its start-up image in coming months.
Beacons are increasingly being projected as the “lighthouses” for mobile users. Brick-and-mortar retailers and mobile marketers promptly add beacons to guide customers. In a major push to beacon marketing and contextual advertising, inMarket announced a strategic partnership with AMI Entertainment Network, for installation of inBar beacons across the US. AMI is the leading provider of digital jukeboxes and video systems to bars and restaurants in the country.
Mobile-for-retail marketing solutions firm inMarket chose 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to announce its latest platform for entertainment venues. Called the InBar Beacon, the new mise-en-scène intelligence platform enables retailers to tap into consumer’s mobile and connecting it to second screen venues. inMarket will partner with AMI Entertainment to introduce more than 23,000 inBars across the US.
The Venice, CA-based marketing platform and app developer is world’s largest mobile-to-mortar beacon platform. Partnering with AMI will facilitate the growth of artificial intelligence-powered assistants to guide shoppers in a hyper-personalized, second-screen ambience. inMarket’s inBar taps in the analytics from the consumer’s mobile and sets up smart jukebox interaction, suggesting relevant songs and offers based on context. It also runs exclusive playlist and AR content to inBar beacon users who prefer to experience the platform.
inBar will be available to all Android mobile devices. All comScore-verified app monthly active users can also activate inBar via inMarket’s SDK platform.
inBar beacon is expected to turn retail shopping on its head with its ‘supercharged’ beacon marketing technology. Designed to engage consumers digitally on an ambient platform, the latest inMarket beacon raises the audience engagement level by many notches.
inMarket ended the year 2016 on a high, registering 223% growth in its clientele. It added top brands like Heineken, Clorox, Energizer, and Rite Aid to its clientele, and influenced consumers during the Black Friday weekend sale.
