Cloudwords Grows Enterprise Investment in Global Marketing Content by 112%; Surpasses 2 Billion Global Marketing Translated Segments

Kaila Garrison, VP Mktg Strategy. Cision

Kaila Garrison
VP Marketing Strategy and Operations, Cision

Leading media intelligence and PR service provider, Cision, revolutionized the paid media measurement ecosystem by unveiling Cision Impact in November 2017. The Cision Intelligence Analysis and Cision Audience are two major components of Cision Impact that makes it possible for brands to measure the impact of earned media and marketing communications programs, including PR, for the first time ever. To understand how Cision Impact offers a unique technological advantage to customers, we spoke to Kaila Garrison, Vice President, Marketing Strategy and Operations, Cision.

Read More: Cision Agrees to Acquire PRIME Research

Html code here! Replace this with any non empty text and that's it.

Tell us about your role in Cision and the team you handle.

I am the Vice President of Marketing Strategy. So, my job is really cross-functional in nature and my responsibilities fall into three groups:

Global Marketing Strategy and Go To Market — In conjunction with Cision’s Chief Marketing Officer, I look after how we’re tackling global markets at Cision. Also, prioritization of budget and how that aligns with the business plan.

Global Marketing Operations and Process – With a global organization supporting multiple products across a number of regions, effective and efficient process and operations are vital. Along with my team of Business Analysts, we look after the building of global processes, the alignment across marketing as well as with other teams at Cision.

Product Marketer for Cision Innovation Center — With my background in Product Marketing and deep understanding of the MarTech and AdTech landscape, I am leading the efforts around the products we’re launching from Cision’s Innovation Center. This includes the latest launch of the Cision ID and Cision Impact.

How do B2B marketers benefit from Cision’s Analytics on earned media resources?

One of the most difficult challenges for PR and Comms Professionals, especially in the B2B Marketing space, is that it’s been nearly impossible to truly connect an earned media campaign with leads generated, products sold or revenue generated.

The reason is that when the communicator builds a campaign —with the goal of driving end-consumer behavior that generates business impact — that comms message must travel an indirect path to the consumer. The message must pass through an influencer such as an analyst or a research outlet like MarTech, or press release, or any one of the ever-growing list of channels in the complex earned media ecosystem.

Because of that indirect path, it has been nearly impossible to track the downstream impact. Standard link tracking capabilities just don’t scale, and the communicator has had to rely on vanity or peripheral metrics, such as potential reach, impressions, and content performance to show how they drive brand awareness and exposure for their company.

What we want to give PR and Comms Professionals is true Earned Media Attribution. So for example: when a B2B Comms Professional launches a new campaign to support a product announcement, they can not only tell the business the number of leads generated, but they can also provide insight into the audience the message hit (firmographic data like title, size of company, past software purchases, etc.). Just like the rest of the marketing department.

What is the difference between ‘Prominence Scoring’ and ‘Impact Scoring’? How do they correlate to Cision Impact?

Cision Impact is a technology that makes it possible for brands to accurately measure the impact of earned media and marketing communications programs, including PR, for the first time ever. With our launch of Cision Impact — our customers will be able to deliver, in a detailed report, the value of their Earned Media efforts. They’ll be able to show earned media metrics that are as definitive as their counterparts in the paid media space and how their campaigns drove revenue for the business. In the first release of the standard reports, we’re collecting this data on every press release that is distributed through PR Newswire. Additionally, this data will be pulled for earned media mentions of the brand on the web.

Cision Impact is different from the Prominence and Impact Scores that we use to quantify the quality of an individual piece of earned media placement.

How do they bring context to earned media coverage?

Cision Impact Reports puts validated reach, audience, engagement and conversion data at the PR and Comms Professionals fingertips. This data not only quantifies the Earned Media ROI but also provides PR and Comms Pros with insights into both their audience and influencers — allowing them to better craft campaigns and identify influencers in the future.

How do you see contemporary data intelligence platforms impacting the performance of personalized content across channels?

At Cision, we look at a very specific part of the marketing world – the relationship between PR/Comms Professionals, influencers, and audiences. And for PR and Comms professionals, contemporary data intelligence platforms prove to be impactful if they can help make predictions about which what content will resonate with both the influencer and the audience. What’s particularly difficult with comms content that passed through an influencer, journalist or media outlet, is that you’re often hoping that your brand or thought leadership positioning will carry through to the end audience, prompting them to engage with your brand directly. Data intelligence platforms that can evolve to understand that pass-through will become an integral part of the day-to-day workflow for PR and Comms.

How does Cision deliver real-time context and optimization?

We’ve very focused figuring out how we influence earned media content. And there is a real-time component to that in the sense that PR/Comms Pros need to be able to mine topics that are currently being discussed, and then figure out how to get their brand involved with those conversations – and with a voice of authority. So, real-time monitoring of media is an important focus for us, as well as pinpointing the influencers who are covering the topics in real-time so that we can connect our customers.

What’s the principle driving brand experience technology?

A brand’s underlying principle has always been about engaging and aligning with their audience as closely as possible. And, as technology evolves, their ability to deliver a customized engagement for thousands or millions of customers is feasible. What brand technology needs – is more data about the audience to fuel the customization.

How critical is it for modern media analytic platforms to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities for better performance and engagement?

Today’s consumers move incredibly fast and across channels. From the brick-and-mortar store to the brand’s app, to a website, to social media channels like Instagram and Pinterest. The idea that a customer follows a linear customer experience path is an ideal – in reality, their path is frenetic. Digital Marketers and Email Marketers have worked together to figure out how they connect the dots to deliver a consistent customer experience. But, the PR and Comms pro is typically stuck at the top of the funnel, delivering one brand message to their entire audience. Where AI and machine learning capabilities can be helpful is combining the art of Communications and the ability to tailor a message to an audience, with the AI/Machine learning on identifying the right influencer to deliver that message and/or the right content based on the real-time attributes and behaviors of a specific audience.

What are your predictions for online media monitoring in 2018?

In 2018 we’ll see modern traditional media monitoring merge with social media monitoring. Today, social media monitoring is often a stand-alone aspect of marketing, but for PR and Comms Professionals Social Media is earned media. Just like print or online media. Treating them separately, measuring and monitoring them separately is not only ineffective, but the ability to report on the data consistently is extremely difficult. In the same vein, understanding an influencer or journalist’s impact on an audience across channels is important. For some traditional journalists and media outlets, the only way to consume the content is through the online outlet. However, for some influencers, there is a whole separate world of people who only follow them on Facebook and Twitter — and that’s how they get their information. Collapsing these channels into earned media monitoring will happen in 2018.

Thanks for chatting with us, Kaila.
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

Interview with Ravi N. Raj, CEO and Co-founder, Passage AI

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

February 5, 2018

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

[mnky_testimonial_slider slide_speed=”3″][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Most businesses want to use bots to help them start addressing customer queries quickly and efficiently, but it can take some companies months to deploy within legacy systems.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to conceive a conversational intelligence company?

My inspiration to co-found Passage AI was sparked by a conversation with my sister. She worked in a call center in India and lamented the fact that each day she would answer the same question over and over, leaving her bored and frustrated. Eventually, she left the job as she wanted to pursue something that would allow her to be more creative. She later became a best-selling author.

However, the problem remained – how could technology help alleviate the boredom associated with repetitive tasks so employees could focus on work that benefits from a personal touch. So we started Passage AI to enable businesses to harness the power of AI-enabled conversational interfaces to bring bottom-line benefit to businesses, alleviate mundane tasks from service agents and let them apply their intellect, all while delivering exceptional customer/user experiences.

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

I do believe that you do need to use your own technology that you’re selling, and our AI chatbot does help funnel in new business inquiries. If you go to the Passage AI website, you’ll see a chatbot pop up in the lower right hand corner that will ask if you’re interested in our bot builder, platform support or AI/NLP. Answering this question funnels you into the right information and background. A user can ask to speak to a human account executive at any point in time.

How soon would we see ‘bots creating bots’ and bots self-deploying anywhere?

Personally, we don’t see bots creating other bots or bots self-deploying anywhere. We feel that bots will be built, trained and deployed using an AI/NLP platform like ours.

What are the core challenges that businesses face in adopting a truly personalized bot conversation platform?

Most businesses want to use bots to help them start addressing customer queries quickly and efficiently, but it can take some companies months to deploy within legacy systems. In addition, most bots don’t truly understand natural language, which can contribute to a frustrating experience for the end-users.

How does Passage AI solve these challenges?

We can deploy a bot in as little as three weeks, getting businesses up and running quickly.

Passage AI has built sophisticated deep learning models using techniques such as LSTM (long short-term memory) which makes it possible for bots created using our platform to understand natural language.

How do you see IT Automation platforms and Virtual Assistants coming together in 2018?

There’s a huge opportunity to transform this area. IT departments can benefit from a chatbot, enabling prompt IT services to employees through a bot. The conversational interface can handle queries, submit tickets, and take direct action through APIs. Again, a password request or access to a certain application or folder are no longer draining scarce IT resources.

What tools does your marketing and advertising stack consist of?

We use MailChimp for email marketing and Twilio for SMS. We also advertise on Google AdWords, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? What are your predictions for the B2B customer service industry in 2018?

According to a survey conducted by Oracle recently, 80 percent of all businesses will want a chatbot by 2020. A chatbot can provide automated responses to frequently asked questions, which can significantly improve customer satisfaction and lower customer service costs. Another survey conducted by Digital Pulse showed that 85 percent of consumers preferred to interact with a bot. We see chatbots revolutionizing the world of customer service in 2018 and beyond.

One word that best describes how you work.

I like to provide full clarity on priorities for myself and my team so everyone is aligned and pulling in the same direction.

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

iPhone, Safari, SMS, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Uber, and Slack.

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

Using AI to figure out the right messages, posts, and emails to read, and in some cases, automatically respond to.

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

“Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love” by Marty Cagan

“When breath becomes air” by Paul Kalanithi

“The Art of War” by Sun Tzu

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

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Ravi” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46fc79-19e0″]

Ravi N. Raj is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Passage AI, Inc. He served as the Head of Product of BloomReach, Inc. until May 17, 2016. Ravi served as Vice President of Products and General Manager of Owned & Operated Sites of Kosmix Corporation (now WalmartLabs, Inc.). He ran Kosmix’s Product team and was responsible for Kosmix.com, RightHealth.com, and Tweetbeat.com. He has a track record of more than 16 years of successfully developing products in the SEM and e-commerce space. He served as a Senior Director of Product Management at Yahoo! and worked for 5 years at Yahoo! in the search, social media, and marketplace verticals. He also managed product teams at AltaVista, Elance, and SGI, and holds patents in sponsored search and e-commerce. Ravi has an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a Master’s from UC, Irvine.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Passage AI” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d357a-6c46fc79-19e0″]

Founded in 2016 by WalmartLabs alumni Madhu Mathihalli and Ravi Raj and LinkedIn alumnus Mitul Tiwari, Passage AI enables businesses to harness the power of AI-enabled conversational interfaces to bring bottom-line benefits, to better utilize service agents saddled by mundane tasks, and to deliver exceptional customer experience. Passage AI counts Kohl’s, Udacity and PwC among the business and services that use its solution. The company has secured $3 million in total funding and is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif.

[/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.

Most Americans See Super Bowl as an Entertainment Spectacle Not Appropriate for Political Messages

By

-

February 3, 2018

Millennials and Gen Xers are more likely to want ads rather than have the Super Bowl ad-free, as the Boomer cohort prefers

Even as player protests have split public opinion during this NFL season, 63 percent of Americans firmly believe the Super Bowl in Minneapolis is not appropriate for political messages, according to a national survey commissioned by Burson-Marsteller’s Fan Experience sports and entertainment specialty and fielded by research consultancy PSB. The survey analyzes viewers’ attitudes toward professional football and the Big Game.

Also Read: Unleashing Digital Video’s Potential for One-to-One Marketing

However, Millennials are more welcoming of a political statement than other demographic groups, with 51 percent saying the game is a very appropriate (21 percent) or a somewhat appropriate (30 percent) venue for a political message. Only 20 percent of Baby Boomers and 36 percent of Generation X respondents believe that, with more than half of Baby Boomers saying the Big Game is not appropriate for a political message.

The Fifth Annual Burson-Marsteller Super Bowl Survey also uncovered very encouraging news for brands advertising during the broadcast, with notable opportunities for engaging fans on a second screen. Over half (55 percent) of both Millennials and Gen Xers would be disappointed if the Super Bowl were ad-free, compared to 41 percent of Baby Boomers. Further, 60 percent of viewers – and 87 percent of constant social media users – are interested in content brands provide on their social channels in addition to the commercials.

Also Read: How AI Will Make Marketing More Personalized In 2018

“The Super Bowl is an event when consumers want to be entertained and marketed to, which is why the game continues to be a key moment in time for brand marketers,” said Kyle Farnham, Burson-Marsteller’s, U.S. Practice Chair, Consumer and Brand Marketing. “The marriage of on-air and online storytelling and the growth of the two-screen experience gives brands more opportunity than ever to extend their engagement with viewers.”

Overall, 55 percent of respondents like the spectacle surrounding the game, including the commercials and halftime show, rather than just the game itself. However, there are considerations, as 24 percent of fans say the halftime show is too long, 22 percent say there are too many commercials and 19 percent would like fewer timeouts or instant replay delays.

When it comes to enjoying the game versus enjoying the spectacle of the game, fans are clear: 73 percent prefer a great game with boring commercials and only 27 percent prefer a boring game with great commercials. When asked about last year’s dramatic, come-from-behind victory for New England over Atlanta, 28 percent of respondents say it was the best game to date. The 2015 game between New England and Seattle ranked a distant second, with 12 percent saying that was the greatest game.

Given fans see the game as a spectacle, they want to be entertained while viewing ads, as 67 percent say funny ads should be the priority. Most want to be informed as well, as nearly half (46 percent) want to learn something new about a product. And, they want to wait for the ads as 69 percent of fans say they will see the ad for the first time during the game, while 13 percent say they will learn about ads prior to the game as part of a news story and 12 percent will seek previews on social media. This jumps to 19 percent for Millennials seeking previews.

Also Read: Five Best Practices for Successful People-Based Marketing

For fans who do want to preview ads before the game, 72 percent will seek them on Facebook while 50 percent will turn to YouTube. When it comes to social sharing of ads, it is a blowout: 87 percent of respondents will use Facebook, followed by Twitter (29 percent), Instagram (27 percent), YouTube (26 percent) and Snapchat (15 percent).

During the game, it is clear fans will engage with a second screen, as 64 percent of respondents say they are likely to use social media during the game. That figure jumps to 78 percent when it comes to Millennials and drops to 42 percent for Baby Boomers. Once again, Facebook is the top choice to share content during the game with 53 percent saying it is their preferred social channel, followed by Instagram (22 percent), Twitter (20 percent), YouTube (17 percent) and Snapchat (16 percent).

“For brands looking to succeed during the game by creating enduring impact with fans, the formula is simple: Entertain fans, drive engagement by delivering social content and make it effortless for fans to share across their networks,” said Jason Teitler, Chair of Burson-Marsteller Fan Experience. “A one-channel approach is a dated strategy, as brands need to surround and engage consumers through a variety of different platforms to foster relationships long after the game.”

When it comes to Super Bowl parties, fans overwhelmingly support smaller gatherings at home with friends and family (62 percent) over going to the game (30 percent) or watching in a public place, such as a sports bar (7 percent). Most fans (59 percent) say they will not attend a party, with 41 percent saying they would attend. By gender, 66 percent of men do not want to go to a party, while nearly half of women (47 percent) plan to attend.

“This year’s survey results show fans are most interested in what happens on the field, with social media playing a prominent role in enabling discussion and activity related to the game’s action,” said Curtis Freet, CEO of PSB.

Also Read: The Essential Audience Fidelity Framework for Search Marketing Success

Eyeota Appoints Jill Orr as Chief Operating Officer

By

-

February 3, 2018

Eyeota, the global leader in audience data with more than 3.5 billion unique profiles across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas, announced the appointment of Jill Orr as Chief Operating Officer.

Based in London, Jill would responsible for scaling Eyeota’s commercial and business operations as well as developing customer products, marketing and insights to support the expansion of Eyeota in all markets.

“Jill is a seasoned executive, with experience driving growth across global organizations, building effective teams, developing successful market strategies and driving efficiencies. Her proven leadership skills will enable us to further scale our operations and make an impact across our organization and the industry,” said Kevin Tan, CEO, Eyeota.

Also Read: Eyeota Secures $12.5M in New Funding

Jill brings over two decades of global media experience to the team, including 13 years at CBS Interactive, CNET and, most recently, three years at Triad Retail Media, a digital retail media specialist, where she led operations in APAC and Europe as EVP International. She played a key role in Triad Retail Media’s market development and was a member of the leadership team who sold the business to WPP in 2016.

“I am excited to join the talented team at Eyeota,” said Jill Orr. “Having established our business in Europe, APAC and Americas, our immediate focus is to scale our operating framework to support the evolving needs of our regional and global clients while maintaining Eyeota’s focus on the customer.”

Also Read: Eyeota Teams With Nativo To Infuse Global Audience Data Into Native Advertising Technology Platform

Viant And Factual Extend Partnership To Deliver People-Based Foot Traffic Attribution

By

-

February 3, 2018

Also Read: Viant’s Adelphic Launches Programmatic Digital OOH Ad Buying, Extending Cross-Channel Breadth and Capability

Viant Launches Real-time Foot Traffic Attribution Report Powered by Factual’s Location Data

Viant, a Time Inc. people-based advertising technology company, announced a major enhancement to their partnership with Factual, the leading location data provider and longtime Viant partner. Through a direct integration, Viant customers will have access to real-time foot traffic measurement and industry leading reporting powered by Factual’s location data through the Viant Advertising Cloud.

The partnership provides valuable in-store and location-based insights to support marketers across various industries such as retail, automotive and travel. Combining Factual’s sophisticated location data with Viant’s deterministic identity and device graph, targeting and measurement capabilities, the partnership provides advertisers with a complete picture of who is visiting a store and when, including insights into the devices and channels that are driving store visits, the DMAs and specific locations that have highest visitation, visits attributed to impressions and time lag from ad exposure to store visits. Advertisers can easily access these intuitive foot traffic attribution reports in real-time through Viant’s self-service Advertising Cloud platform, while Viant’s customer support team both aid in setup and work on the backend to ensure the data is processed efficiently in the UI.

“Brick and mortar still accounts for roughly 90% of total retail sales, and 70% of shoppers are looking for interaction in physical retail environments. It is critical for brand marketers to understand how their campaigns impact both foot traffic and in-store sales,” said Viant CMO, Jon Schulz. “Our ability to ingest and link Factual’s location data to our graph provides our clients with people-based insights on which customers are visiting which stores and when, enabling marketers to optimize campaigns in-flight, when it matters most.”

“Using Factual’s quality location data in combination with Viant’s Advertising Cloud, marketers will have access to detailed reports on in-store visitation that allow them to measure the true value of their media investments and gives them the visibility to understand and target their most valuable audiences,” said Ocean Fine, VP of Agencies & Strategic Partners at Factual.

Also Read: S4M Partners With Factual to Measure Foot Traffic In-Store

How to Boost Push Notification Engagement with Mobile App Deep Linking

By

CleverTap

-

February 3, 2018

Deep links are becoming an essential part of the mobile marketer’s toolkit.

Users have come to expect a personalized app experience, so sending push notifications that offer real value is essential for keeping them engaged with your app.

Deep linking from push notifications sends users to specific pages within an app, making it easy for users to reconsider an abandoned cart, view new content, shop a sale, or fall in love with new features.

In this article, we’ll cover the essentials of mobile app deep linking and how you can use them to send push notifications that delight your users.

What Is Mobile App Deep Linking?

Instead of simply launching the app and leaving users at the home screen, tapping on a deep link brings users to a specific page within your app. Think product pages, profiles, new content, or shopping carts. Deep links can take users to in-app content directly from:*

Website to app
Ad to app
Push notification to app
SMS to app
Email to app
Social media post to app
App to app
Search result listing to app (using app indexing)

How to Deep Link to Improve the Mobile User Experience

Mobile users have high expectations. It’s not enough for apps to be fast, reliable, and secure — users demand a personalized experience. And that’s exactly what deep links help you deliver.

Deep linking allows marketers to fine-tune the way users interact with their app.

WIth deep links, mobile marketers can design personalized campaigns that help users — providing useful and relevant content instead of a boring “Come back!” CTA.

Deep linking is the perfect tool for marketers to drive engagement and conversions by bringing users to specific conversion points within the app, tailored by their past behavior or stated interests.

Also Read: Top Mobile Marketing Trends and Influencers to Watch for 2018

Say you get a push notification about an item on your wishlist that’s now on sale. You tap the link to open the app and add the item to your cart, but a non-deep link will simply drop you off at the app’s home screen. You’ll have to navigate back to the product listing, which is annoying at best. You might even decide it’s not worth the trouble and close the app.

Deep links make for frictionless transitions and better user experiences.

And they work: apps that implement deep links have been shown to double user retention* across 1-day, 7-days, and 30-days.

In fact, users who were sent deep links showed double the activation rate and visited the app twice as frequently as users who weren’t sent deep links. And using deep links accounts for an average 66% rise in conversions. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

How Does Mobile Deep Linking Work?

As the app deep linking experts at Branch Metrics explain,* there are three standards for mobile deep links: URI schemes, Universal Links, and App Links.

URI Schemes

For a long time, URI schemes* were the main method for mobile app deep linking.

What’s a URI scheme?

You know http:// and https:// schemes on the web, and you’re probably familiar with schemes like ftp:// or mailto://. These schemes note the type of content being requested. Your mobile app can register its own custom URI scheme, like mygreatapp://.

But custom URI schemes aren’t a perfect solution. As Shannon Wu notes,* they present two significant problems:

-When the app isn’t installed, the user sees an error message.

-Because there’s no central registration system, more than one app can claim the same custom URI scheme.

Because of these issues, Apple and Android created their own deep linking standards.

Universal Links and App Links

With the release of iOS 9.2 in January 2016, Apple changed how Safari handles URI schemes. They no longer work seamlessly for linking from a mobile web page into your app, especially if the app isn’t installed on the user’s device.

Universal Links are deep links created for iOS, while App Links are created for Android. With both Universal Links and App Links there’s a built-in fallback option that can redirect users to your website if the app isn’t installed.

Universal Links offer some advantages* over traditional URI schemes, including enhanced privacy and security. Apple has also implemented a central whitelisted domain, so no two apps can use the same naming conventions.

But not everyone is thrilled with Apple’s deep linking solution. For one, an app opened from a deep link will include an override button in the top right corner, giving users the option to view the content in their mobile web browser instead.

iOS remembers this decision and routes subsequent Universal Links to the mobile browser instead of the app. Some experts argue* that it’s too easy for users to disable universal links without realizing it (or know how to undo it), resulting in a poor user experience and leading users to assume the app itself is broken.

How to Use Deep Links with Push Notifications to Boost User Engagement

A timely, personalized push message can be incredibly effective in engaging users. But a targeted, well-written notification that gets users excited about a new feature or promotion only to drop them on the home screen? Talk about a wasted opportunity.

Here are a few deep linking examples for your push notifications to delight users and boost engagement, conversions, and retention.

Link to specific promotions and products
Take users directly to the relevant category page or product listing.

Link to new features
You’ve released an exciting new feature, but it’s taking users a while to discover it on their own. Help them learn and adopt key features or functionality faster.

Link to location-based content (requires location access)
Send a push notification with a deep link to a nearby restaurant’s page or coupon while a user is in the area.

Link to breaking news and trending content
Keep users informed of the latest news as it happens, without searching or navigating content categories.

Link to personalized content
Share updates on the artists or content topics a user has shown interest in, related products based on purchase history, a new message in their inbox, etc.

Personalize the onboarding experience
Bring new users who weren’t successfully activated back into the onboarding flow with special incentives, or automatically apply a clicked-on promo code to their first order.

Recapture abandoned carts
Send users back to an abandoned shopping cart, or a specific page in the checkout process.

Improve re-engagement campaigns
Inactive users aren’t opening your app, so you need to use external channels like push notifications to reach them. Use deep links to send these users straight to your stickiest in-app content, or encourage actions that are proven to re-engage users.

Enable partnerships with other apps
Partnering with other apps can help you provide an even better user experience. For example, Yummly partnered with Instacart to allow users to add recipe ingredients for delivery with a single tap. Yelp and OpenTable once partnered to make reserving a spot at a hot restaurant quick and easy.

Using deferred deep links through a service like Branch can ensure users who don’t have the partner app installed are sent to the proper place.

Deep Linking Mobile Apps the Right Way
Deep links are a powerful mobile marketing tool. But like any tool, you have to know how to use them properly to reap the benefits.

Because deep links take users directly to in-app content, it can take them out of your intended ideal user flow. You need to be strategic about how you use deep links, especially when it comes to new users.

Take a look at each screen in your app. If you dropped a new user on that page, would they understand what your app does? Would they need to have registered an account, added billing info, etc., in order to complete the desired action?

Deep links should take users directly to the intended content without any required logins or interstitial pages disrupting them. Carefully plan how your deep linking strategy will work with the structure and logic of your app in order to enhance the user experience — not interrupt it.

When paired with CleverTap’s powerful personalization features and behavioral analytics, deep linking from push notifications lets you customize the user experience to wow your users and grow your app.

Also Read: How Marketers Can Optimize $682 Billion in Expected Spend in 2018

Hobbs and Qubit Partner as Millions of Pounds Driven by Personalization

By

-

February 3, 2018

British designer chooses Qubit for another year to drive customer experience initiatives and differentiate

Hobbs London, the global women’s fashion retailer, are continuing to make personalization a top priority by partnering with Qubit after realising an excellent performance from the Qubit Pro personalization platform in the first year. Qubit, the leaders in marketing personalization technology, provide Hobbs with the most comprehensive record of their online visitors, enabling them to match visitor behavior and purchase history with the most relevant and timely personalizations.

“We put the customer first in everything we do,” said Andy Wilson, Head of Ecommerce at Hobbs. “Matching the in-store experience with the online experience was a must and we needed a robust technology to achieve it. In our first year with Qubit we’ve driven significant value across multiple customer experience initiatives that have allowed us to tailor our offering and recommendations to different customer segments. Personalization is not a ‘nice to have’ for Hobbs, it’s essential.”

The Hobbs online store launched in 2008, with the company now delivering to 55 countries worldwide. Having recently been acquired by The Foschini Group (TFG), the company are on a trajectory to become one of the leading luxury retail brands online. With a focus on understanding site visitors’ historic behavior and their on-site activity in real-time, the ecommerce team can make the digital experience a true differentiator. Alongside Qubit, the Hobbs team have built a culture of data-first decision making and the results are just starting to show. For example, the product recommendations experience deployed through Qubit across multiple domains is driving more than £2.3mil in revenue.

Another compelling reason to continue the partnership was to eliminate unnecessary complexity in IT and consolidate their personalization initiatives into one platform and data architecture. Streamlining the technology estate has been key to unlocking greater flexibility when building relevant experiences for customers online which, for a fashion business, is imperative. For 2018, Hobbs and Qubit will continue to deliver relevant customer experiences that can scale across multiple domains and customer segments, driving loyalty with existing customers as well as attracting new customers.

“Established retailers like Hobbs are staples of the British high street, they’ve consistently proven the ability to innovate with changing market conditions in their 30 year history”, said Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit, “We enable the deepest, most intelligent understanding of their visitors and can then precisely match that visitor with the widest range of personalization experiences. Hobbs are already seeing tremendous value through personalization and the Qubit Pro platform and I’m delighted that we’re continuing to work with them.”

Also Read: Qubit and Looker Forge Partnership to Empower Data-Driven Personalization for E-Commerce

When it Comes to Ad Blocking, Personalization is the New Scale

By

Mark Smith

-

February 3, 2018

When it Comes to Ad Blocking, Personalization is the New Scale

While the debate over ad blocking has long centered on the struggle between publishers and ad blockers about the ability to display ads, less attention has been paid to whether or not these ads should be displayed at all. If marketing is about meeting consumers’ needs, then more than 75 million US consumers have already said, simply by installing a blocker, that they don’t like the ads being pushed at them. That is a lot of people and doesn’t even include the vast majority of consumers that browse the web without blockers, but rarely or never click ads, and perhaps no longer even “see” them in a truly conscious sense.

While ad blockers and “non-clickers” have existed for a long time, it appears that they’re starting to have a major impact on ad efficiency based on a few actions that happened last year. JPMorgan Chase cut its ad volume by nearly 90% early in 2017 and saw the exact same results. P+G, in the second quarter, took more than $100 million out of its digital marketing budget to curb “ineffective” ads and announced in July that growth wasn’t impacted. YouTube dealt with an exodus because advertisers were concerned about placement across its vast and opaque network. On the sell side, demand for DSPs is rapidly decreasing as too many platforms compete over not enough inventory.

At the end of the day, marketers (like brands) want results, and it’s becoming clear that personalization – not scale – is the best way to get there. Whether consumers are blocking ads or corporations aren’t buying them, the end result is fewer ads in the ecosystem. As demand for ads continues to drop on both the consumer and advertising side, a couple ideas that marketers have been talking about for a while move closer to becoming the reality.

Also Read: Who’s Responsible for Solving the Billion-Dollar Ad Fraud Problem?

Marketing Is About the Bottom Line

More than a century ago, John Wanamaker quipped that half of his advertising budget was wasted, he just didn’t know which half. For many modern CMOs, the percentage that’s wasted is growing smaller. A year ago, a survey found that two out of three European marketers use attribution in some capacity to understand the value of their marketing. Huge platforms like Facebook are giving unprecedented transparency to marketers demanding more granular measurement.

An improved measurement means that a true focus on the bottom line isn’t impossible, and is now leading to fundamental changes in which the traditional big-spenders are drastically slashing budgets with confidence. While marketers have long talked about moving towards a more bottom-line oriented model, that reality has arrived for many.

Marketing Is Integrated

At a time when the omnichannel and multi-channel marketing strategies have never been more popular, and perhaps the biggest players in the space are now integrated cloud platforms, the debate over ad blocking is singularly focused on digital ads. In 2017, this is woefully outdated.

We know that most consumers are not intrinsically opposed to the concept of advertising and that relevant or personalized messages delivered at the “right time” in the “right place” are effective. Indeed lots of research points to customers being willing to pay more for a great experience. It’s time for the debate to shift away from an argument over rules around a single push tactic, and towards a discussion of what it means to deliver relevant, timely and valuable messages to consumers – messages that they will want and thus an experience they will appreciate.

A decline in buying on one channel where many consumers are known to dislike ads is a function of the fact that marketers don’t need to rely on broad display campaigns anymore, and can instead market in a more personalized way across a variety of channels.

As integrated, results-oriented marketing becomes more possible than ever, US ad spending overall continues to grow rapidly. Marketers have no problem spending where they can see results and are ever more in-tune with consumer behavior and preferences. A consumer who ad blocks is not communicating to a marketer that they don’t want to be reached, they are simply expressing a preference that should provide valuable context and inform a more effective strategy. Smart marketers will and have already to some extent, adapt.

The only way that ad blocking will cost the publishing ecosystem $35.4B by 2020 is if publishers and digital advertisers fail to adapt to the reality that the consumer is now in the driver’s seat, and it’s up to marketers to reach them when and where they prefer, not thwart their efforts to browse the web in peace.

Also Read: How Marketers Can Optimize $682 Billion in Expected Spend in 2018

Why Local Search Is the Real Winner on Super Bowl Sunday

By

Alex Porter

-

February 3, 2018

Guest-Post-Alex-Porter Super Bowl Location data

The Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event of the year – last year, 111.3 million viewers tuned in, making Super Bowl LI the fifth most-watched TV broadcast in history. But for local franchises and brick-and-mortar businesses in Minneapolis, the Super Bowl is the biggest weekend of the year to potentially increase advertising spending in order to maximize in-store traffic among the big game’s attendees. While the event draws millions of dollars for local businesses of its host city, it also has an economic impact on online and brick-and-mortar businesses across the country, regardless of your proximity to the teams or host location. In 2017, the Super Bowl brought in $347 million for greater Houston’s economy, $107 million more than 2016’s big game. Super Bowl LII is an excuse for franchisees and retailers to launch targeted sales and promotions, utilizing local search strategies, including mobile targeting, website optimization and paid advertising to increase awareness for your brand and business locations. If your brand has goals to capitalize on Super Bowl LII, here are some tips to ensure you’re the real winner.

Be Mobile-First

The first step is to ensure your business is ready for what will likely be spikes in mobile web traffic. Three-quarters of Americans (77%) own a smartphone and 111.9 million Americans watched the Super Bowl last year. Just consider how people are viewing and partaking in Super Bowl activities – through bars, restaurants, parties or at home. Their main connection to the web is often via their mobile devices, so ensuring your siteis mobile-optimized is key, especially for those holy-grail near-me searches.

Mobile searches have been on the rise, with 78% of local-mobile searches (i.e. “best sports bars near me”) resulting in offline purchases. Consumers are increasingly on-the-go, especially during an event like the Super Bowl, and rely on localized mobile searches to get them what they need, when they need it. This rings true especially during the big game, as any franchise that offers delivery services will see an uptick on mobile traffic and orders and need to be prepared. Pizza Hut generated nearly $12 million in sales during the Super Bowl alone, and a big contributor to that revenue gain involved their mobile application and mobile website.

Google reports nearly 33% of mobile searches are location-based queries. If your franchise location isn’t easily discoverable online, chances are you’re losing out on profit and potential customers. A simple fix is to establish consistent, accurate and robust information about your location in key directories like Google My Business, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Maps and more. Ensure your business information (name, address, phone number, business hours, website link) is up-to-date, and listed across multiple online directories and filled with non-branded keywords related to your business. It’s also important to complement branded content by populating business listings with custom details specific to your location, and potentially relevant to the Super Bowl (products, services, offers, affiliations, certifications, etc.), to maximize exposure around the big game.

If your franchise is planning to cater to the Super Bowl masses, ensure you tested your page load times frequently leading up to the big day. You don’t want to lose out on profit because of a slow-loading site or a poorly designed interface.

Also Read: Eight Ways AI Will Be Used In Marketing In 2018

Understand the Power of Organic and Paid Search

If there was ever a time to combine paid and organic SEO tactics, that time has come. Creating awareness around your brand and product is key to winning the Super Bowl local search game. For the days and weeks leading up to the event, customers will proactively search for places to stay, things to do and buy, including food, drinks, places to watch the game, flight tickets, etc. Your brand needs to show up in these online searches, and if you’re in Minneapolis – for geo-specific terms and phrases.

On the paid media side, understand how Facebook, Instagram and Google can be used to generate awareness for locals and fans flocking to your city (if applicable). Serving targeted, paid local ads on these channels during the lead up to the Super Bowl, and during/after the game can help you better capitalize on users needs and wants, and place your brand and business front and center for attracting their attention (and spending money).. On the organic side, set up local events on Facebook for your business that relate to the big game. Do you own a sports bar showing the Super Bowl? Create an event and promote it to ensure it’s being seen by fans. Make Facebook work for you, and make sure customers can find you.

Optimize Your Key Phrases

While you might not be paying for Super Bowl ads, the ones running might have a direct impact on your business. If you own a local franchise of a national brand that is advertising during the game, your sales will be directly impacted if your search terms are optimized properly. For example, ads from automotive brands typically lead to a spike in website traffic after airing. And if you own a local dealership that sells the brand mentioned, customers can flock to your site for more information on key products and services.

Research and be aware of the ads being planned for Super Bowl LII – brands start to announce their intent weeks before the big day, meaning you should do the same. Include phrases like “automotive dealers near me” or “pepsi products near me” within your search terms, as applicable to your brand. It’s key to perform keyword buys for products being advertised if you sell them locally.

Also Read: Five Key Trends for Programmatic Advertising in 2018

Let’s Win This Super Bowl

The key to winning Super Bowl LII isn’t just local search tactics, but to ensure you have an active presence across multiple digital channels that are most likely to be frequented by Super Bowl viewers and those in attendance in Minneapolis. Make sure your paid, earned and owned media strategies are properly aligned and best set up to capture customers during the most relevant times. . Much like the teams playing in the NFL’s marquee event, proper preparation and planning can go a long way toward helping your brand, franchisees and business locations come out on top during Super Bowl weekend this year!

Also Read: How Marketers Can Optimize $682 Billion in Expected Spend in 2018

Kitewheel Partners with Zeta Global to Bring Customer Journeys to ZetaHub

By

-

February 3, 2018

1

New Offering Enables Orchestration of Customer Interactions Across a Wide Range of Digital and Physical Channels

Kitewheel, provider of the leading Customer Journey Hub for brands and agencies, announced a strategic partnership with data-driven marketing technology innovator Zeta Global. The partnership will enable Zeta to seamlessly integrate Kitewheel’s industry-leading orchestration capabilities into the Gartner Magic Quadrant-rated ZetaHub.

The AI-powered ZetaHub platform combines Zeta’s marketing, data and experience clouds through a single ‘command center’ capable of activating first, second and third party data connected to identity and enriched by signals. Recently recognized by Forrester as a leader in the customer journey space, Kitewheel’s world-class orchestration technology will now integrate with the ZetaHub to provide Zeta’s enterprise clients with enhanced capabilities to combine omni-channel customer data collection, customer journey analytics, real-time decisioning and orchestration of customer interactions across all channels.

“The vision of the ZetaHub is to be the nerve center for enterprises as they shift to a new model of marketing focused on marketing to individuals, across all channels, underpinned by AI,” said Steven Gerber, Zeta Global’s President & COO. “Realizing this vision requires us to complement our world-class platform with best-in-class applications. We’ve been wowed by the technology and tools that the Kitewheel team has built and how they extend and enhance what we’re already doing. This strategic partnership builds on the work we’re doing with AppNexus, LiveRamp and Visto to bring to life 1:1 marketing at scale for the world’s leading brands.”

Enterprises are increasingly focused on delivering seamless and personalized customer experiences across all digital and physical channels, but often struggle with silos and disparate technologies. Marketers using ZetaHub can now deliver more consistent and personalized experiences at scale from a single location, furthering Zeta’s mission to provide its customers with a people-based, omni-channel platform.

“We’re excited to partner with Zeta Global to bring customer journey orchestration to their platform,” said Mark Smith, President of Kitewheel. “Marketers are demanding increased visibility into customer behavior and the ability to react in real-time at scale, which we’ll be able to deliver as part of this new collaboration.”

Local Media Consortium Partners with Integral Ad Science to Deliver Better Results to Members for Brand Safety, Ad Fraud, and Viewability

By

-

February 2, 2018

The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a strategic alliance of leading local media companies, today announced a new partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), a global measurement and analytics company that builds verification, optimization, and analytics solutions to empower the advertising industry to invest with confidence and activate consumers everywhere.

By partnering with IAS, the LMC will enable its members – which include more than 75 local media companies representing more than 1,700 newspaper, broadcast, and digital titles – to ensure and deliver better results to their advertisers and address marketers needs for brand safety, ad fraud, and viewability for digital display and video ad inventory across desktop and mobile web. Using IAS’s automated real-time platform, LMC members can seamlessly eliminate impression waste, streamline workflow, improve inventory quality, and increase revenue.

Also Read: Local Media Consortium Announces Partnership with Facebook’s CrowdTangle

Rusty Coats

“Thanks to IAS, our members – who offer more than 12 billion ad impressions each month to agencies and brands seeking to reach quality local audiences in brand-safe environments – will have even greater control over direct and programmatic deals,” said Rusty Coats, CEO of the Local Media Consortium. “As media companies are increasingly challenged by ad fraud and ad blocking, IAS will provide greater means to verify and optimize inventory, helping participating members to validate and protect their ad traffic.”

IAS scores ad inventory for the URL down to the impression level on the key metrics media companies care most about: viewability, ad fraud, geo-compliance, and brand safety. It provides a single source of reporting that unifies publisher and customer data, eliminating discrepancies that come from multiple data sets. IAS’s optimization tool is powered by both machine learning and a dedicated FraudLab that makes sure ads are served to real people and reach the right audiences – all to maximize ROI for buyers and sellers.

Dave Marquard

“Our commitment to helping local media companies thrive through better ad inventory makes us an ideal partner for the LMC,” said Dave Marquard, VP of publisher product for IAS. “By automating custom ad delivery down to the placement level, the LMC’s members will have a greater opportunity to monetize more of their impressions and deliver on custom advertiser standards for brand safety, viewability, and fraud-free environments.”

Lionbridge and inRiver Enhance Product Information Management Connector to Bring Greater Value to Multilingual Marketing

By

-

February 2, 2018

The Lionbridge Connector now supports the newest version of inRiver Product Marketing Cloud to improve global customer engagement through integrated, automated translation

Lionbridge Technologies, Inc., the world’s most trusted translation and global digital communications company, announced the latest enhancements to the Lionbridge connector for the inRiver product information management (PIM) platform, which now supports the newest version of the inRiver Product Marketing Cloud.

This major upgrade of inRiver, as well as the Lionbridge connector, allows cloud access and enables customers to experience a seamless integration of Lionbridge’s industry-leading translation automation technology with inRiver’s award-winning PIM solution.

The Lionbridge connector for inRiver is compatible with inRiver Product Marketing Cloud and features a fully automated, single-click translation process that optimizes the practice of creating and publishing the right product content in the right language. Managing product information and translations through this efficient process gives companies up to 90 percent internal resource time savings and over 40 percent reduced time to market compared with traditional translation methods.

Also Read: Lionbridge Strengthens Executive Team with New CMO and CRO

The Lionbridge connector is compatible with inRiver’s cloud platform, allowing product marketing teams to:

Generate upwards of 30 percent cost savings compared with traditional translation methods;
Easily create e-commerce experiences for customers around the globe;
Target audiences with more personalized messages in their native languages;
Manage translation projects from any location, at any time; and
Experience inRiver’s word-class PIM solution that increases usability, connectivity and insights.

“Global, multilingual marketing can seem like a daunting undertaking—particularly when simultaneously managing diverse departments, content, regions and fast-moving product and service deployments,” said Anja Schaefer, Vice President, Global Solutions at Lionbridge “By integrating Lionbridge’s automated translation solutions with inRiver Product Marketing Cloud, end-users can rest assured that they will deliver always-on content to all audiences—regardless of geography or language preferences.”

“As a longtime partner, Lionbridge has the relevant experience to bring the next generation translation services to market for inRiver Product Marketing Cloud,” said Joe Golemba, VP Strategic of Alliances for inRiver. “Our customer feedback helped to shape the updated service, and we’re looking forward to supporting our joint customers as they wade through the challenging waters of globalizing content at scale—all without stretching budgets and resources.”

Metadata Joins the Marketo Accelerate Partner Ecosystem

By

-

February 2, 2018

Metadata Joins the Marketo Accelerate Partner Ecosystem

Artificial Intelligence Operators Create Predictable Lead Flow for Marketo Users

Metadata, the patented platform for closed-loop account-based marketing, announced that it has joined the Marketo Accelerate ecosystem, the MarTech industry’s first partner accelerator. The Metadata platform integrates into the Marketo Engagement Platform to enable marketers to create and deliver personalized experiences to their customers across all channels throughout the buyer’s journey.

Also Read: SnapApp Joins Marketo Accelerate to Enable B2B Marketers to Better Engage Audiences Through Interactive Experiences

“Metadata is excited to be partnering with Marketo, the world leader in engagement marketing. Our smart integration enables Marketo clients to access the largest B2B prospect database of segmentation and multivariate advertising capabilities, allowing them to execute true closed-loop account-based marketing programs at scale,” said Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO at Metadata.io.

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

Shai Alfandary, vice president, global head of ISVs and LaunchPoint ecosystem, Marketo, added, “The Marketo Accelerate program provides emerging companies with a tailored program to grow their business with Marketo. The Metadata platform’s unique AI operator greatly expands campaign execution capabilities available to marketing teams to generate pipeline, making them a great fit for the Accelerate program.”

Also Read: KickFire Announces Partnership with Metadata.io to Fuel Account Based Marketing with Machine Learning

Announced in 2017, Marketo Accelerate is a part of Marketo’s robust, best-in-class partner ecosystem, LaunchPoint. The program provides partners with full access to the Marketo Engagement Platform, sales enablement activities, co-marketing activities, and more to drive growth for their businesses. The inaugural partners of Marketo Accelerate – Cloudwords, Mintigo, Oktopost, SnapApp, and Uberflip – integrate into Marketo’s Engagement Platform, and together, empower marketers with the technologies they need to build a best-of-breed marketing platform to listen, learn, and engage with buyers seamlessly across channels.

If A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words, Then Visual, Interactive Content Is Priceless

By

Dan Martin

-

February 2, 2018

If A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words, Then Visual, Interactive Content Is Priceless — Dan Martin

In recent years, traditional display ads have become less popular in favor of newer formats like native and digital video. According to an IAB study, advertisers in 2017 spent 67 percent more on digital video than they did two years prior. It has become clear that the more visually stimulating an advertisement, the more likely someone will click on it.

But what’s after video? This year, as machine learning, artificial intelligence, HTML5 and other tools evolve and are more widely adopted, expect interactive, highly visual real-time contextual ads to become the next big thing. Here’s a closer look at a few reasons for this trend.

Interactive Content Will Aid Publishers

Advertisers aren’t the only ones who stand to reap the benefits of interactive content; publishers will also be able to generate it for their readership. Here at Arkadium, we recently conducted our own study that shows how people respond to interactive content on news sites. The purpose of the study was to evaluate whether the presence of visual and interactive content made a difference in consumer behavior when browsing online publications. Our results were staggering.

Almost 80 percent of the 1,000 respondents in our survey said that they’re likely to click on an article that’s accompanied by a visual. In addition, 50 percent want more interactive content on the news sites they frequent.

This shift towards a more interactive digital experience is reflective of millennial consumer interests. Of those who stated that they’d likely return to a website with interactive content, 81 percent identified themselves as millennials. Since a whopping 82 percent of millennials get most of their news online, their habits will shape the way publishers generate content, and how brands advertise in 2018.

Also Read: Media Is Hard and We Suck at It; And, How to Be Better in 2018

AI and Machine Learning Are Key – for Publishers & Advertisers

AI and machine learning tools play a major role in the development of interactive content, especially on the publisher side. A major hurdle that most publishers have to overcome is a lack of resources (either in manpower or technology) to create visual, interactive content, at any scale. A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that available resources are shrinking. According to the findings, newsroom employment figures dropped a whopping 10 percent in 2016. As organizations are forced to consolidate and budgets continue to decrease, developing interactive media has become increasingly difficult. That being said, AI and machine learning tools can be used to dynamically build and scale in-demand interactive content, despite the lack of resources and capital.

Scaling interactive branded content presents an extraordinary opportunity for publishers to enable marketers to engage their audiences, however also has faced similar challenges. The best branded content experiences — ones that deliver the most value for advertisers and can be sold at a premium for publishers — are interactive. Seventy-three percent of marketers say that incorporating interactive content into their campaigns enhances brand retention among their audiences. However, scaling interactive branded content has been difficult to achieve due to production economics (manual creation/delivery) and providing an organic consumer experience. With AI and machine learning technology, publishers and advertisers now have the ability to produce and deliver extraordinary interactive ad experiences at internet scale. These tools now enable publishers and their advertisers with the ability to deliver relevant, interactive experiences in real time to consumers and are producing unprecedented organic engagement as a result.

In the coming year, we expect more publishers and advertisers to invest in technology and tools to produce interactive content for their readers. AI and machine learning will be the backbone that makes this possible, with increased consumer engagement and overall digital experiences improved for publishers and advertisers as a result.

Also Read: How Marketers Can Optimize $682 Billion in Expected Spend in 2018

Marketo Announces Integration with Slack to Improve Sales and Marketing Collaboration

By

-

February 2, 2018

Marketo Announces Integration with Slack to Improve Sales and Marketing Collaboration

New Integration Enables Notifications In Real-Time

Marketo, Inc, the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, announced a partnership with Slack, to empower Marketo users to communicate and collaborate effectively to engage their customers at the right time.

“Buyers expect businesses to respond to them in the moment. Today’s enterprises are searching for solutions that will give them the competitive edge and allow them to engage with customers instantly,” said T.K. Kader, group vice president of Strategy, Corporate Development and Global Alliances, Marketo. “Marketo and Slack have joined forces to create a joint solution that provides real-time notifications about customer engagement, to build the pipeline and ultimately drive revenue.”

The trend among high-growth companies is to leverage their sales and marketing channels to manage and optimize the customer experiences across all channels including direct, indirect, and digital. But that requires a solid alignment between the two teams that often doesn’t exist. Marketo and Slack have created an integration that provides sales and marketing teams real-time notifications about leads. The integration also delivers campaign issues and system alerts that may impact ongoing campaigns to system administrators through dedicated Slack channels.

“We are thrilled to see Marketo and Slack working together to enable our sales and marketing teams to communicate and align to drive revenue effectively,” said Hugo Angelmar, director, growth marketing, Fivestars. “Fivestars has seen a lot of success using Slack and Marketo to connect with our prospects at the right moment, in real-time and manage our scaled marketing efforts. This partnership will help us further innovate in our approach to lead generation and customer engagement.”

In November last year, Marketo increased the sync speed of their industry-leading native Salesforce CRM integration by up to 50% to empower marketing and sales teams to convert more leads to revenue.

Conversational AI Leader Conversica Acquires Intelligens.ai, Accelerating Growth and Technology Leadership

By

-

February 2, 2018

Conversational AI Leader Conversica Acquires Intelligens.ai, Accelerating Growth and Technology Leadership

Artificial Intelligence Leader Expands Product Capabilities and Geographic Footprint and Adds Top Data Science and Engineering Talent

Conversica, the leader in conversational AI for business, announced that it has acquired Intelligens.ai, a provider of conversational AI for sales and marketing focused on the Latin American market. Intelligens is a rapidly growing private company based in Santiago, Chile—the “Chilecon Valley” of Latin America. Founded in 2016, Intelligens has more than 40 customers in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia.”

The Intelligens acquisition brings with it new Facebook Messenger, Slack and Skype integrations and a rich repository of AI conversations in Spanish, adding to Conversica’s already extensive machine learning data set. The Intelligens technology, conversations and data set will be incorporated into Conversica’s conversational AI platform over the coming months, allowing current customers to take advantage of the new capabilities and increased AI accuracy—a result of the larger training data set now available. In addition, customers will also benefit from an increased pace of innovation, thanks to the new data science and engineering talent joining the Conversica team.

Also Read: How AI Will Make Marketing More Personalized In 2018

“Conversica is building the world’s best platform to automate business conversations with AI. Intelligens brings exciting capabilities that naturally extend Conversica’s solution to include new communication channels, conversations, language expertise and training data. The conversational AI space is exploding, with more and more organizations recognizing the value of automating routine conversations to grow revenue, manage costs and free up their human workforce for more productive activities. We recognized an opportunity with Intelligens to accelerate our product roadmap and add exceptional talent to our team. We are thrilled to bring aboard new customers and partners in Latin America and extend our reach into this fast-growing market of over 400 million native Spanish speakers,” said Conversica CEO Alex Terry.

Also Read: Pessimistic Security, Embedded AI and GDPR to Reign Supreme in the Legal Sector in 2018

Conversica automates and improves routine business conversations using virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence. The company’s AI Sales Assistant engages every lead in a human conversation to qualify more of them for the sales team, freeing humans to spend more time closing business.

In 2017, the company received several industry award wins and celebrated many notable milestones:

Grew annual recurring revenue greater than 50 percent for the third consecutive year.
Released significant new AI capabilities—including support for conversations via text/SMS messaging, new assistant languages (Spanish, French, German and Japanese), self-service conversation editing capabilities to empower customers to further optimize AI conversations, and enhanced deep learning algorithms to enable more complex natural language understanding—and processed more than 300 million messages.
Added integrations with important CRM and marketing automation systems, including Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, HubSpot and CDK, for more than 50 technical integrations in total.
Grew the company’s management team with four new additions, including Dr. Sid J. Reddy as Chief Scientist, Brian Kaminski as Chief Customer Officer, Victor Belfor as Senior Vice President of Business Development, and Michelle Johnson as General Counsel.
Added key new employees in engineering, data science, operations, customer success, and sales to grow the company to over 190 employees.
Was recognized by Red Herring as one of the Top 100 private technology companies in the world and was included in the 2018 “AI 100” by CB Insights.

Javelin Agency Makes Two Leadership Appointments

By

-

February 2, 2018

Javelin Agency Makes Two Leadership Appointments

Robert Bentley Has Been Named Vice President Of Marketing Technology, And David Anders Has Been Named Executive Vice President Of Business Development And Strategic Alliances

Javelin Agency has bolstered its leadership team by making two senior appointments. Robert Bentley has been named vice president of marketing technology, and David Anders has been named executive vice president of business development and strategic alliances.

Bentley has extensive experience across a number of world-class brands. Prior to Javelin, he was director of customer database marketing for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. There, he was tasked with managing cross-channel campaign data, operations and technology for brands including Windows, Xbox, Surface, Windows Phone, Hololens, Bing and MSN. Prior to Microsoft, he led connected device partner marketing for Amazon, and was responsible for co-marketing planning and relationships between Amazon Instant Video and third-party device manufacturers.

Anders has spent his career strategically leading clients to improve marketing performance by leveraging data to create better integrated experiences. He has held leadership positions in the agency world, handling business for world-class brands, including AT&T, Microsoft and Kellogg. He most recently rejoined Javelin from VML, where he served as managing director and Kellogg global client lead. He credits his return to Javelin, where he’d previously served as managing director of its Seattle office, to the agency’s new focus on blending its customer experience and CRM expertise to create better connections between customers and brands.

“We’re continually striving to create remarkable experiences for people that create business outcomes for clients,” said Mike McCartin, CEO of Javelin Agency. “Rob and David bring a depth of expertise in technology and partnerships that will extend Javelin’s capabilities to deliver even more powerful, measurable results for our clients. They are both important additions to our executive team.”

“Diversifying our leadership in data, technology and partnerships better positions us to help modern brands grow by creating customer value through individualized experiences,” added Tina Posey, president.

Anders and Bentley are based in the agency’s Dallas office.

Javelin Agency, an Omnicom company, uses data to uncover insights to create ideas that make people feel something so that they’ll do something.

Behavioral Science Lab BrandEmbrace Successfully Completes MASB Audit

By

prweb

-

February 2, 2018

Behavioral Science Lab BrandEmbrace Successfully Completes MASB Audit

Brandembrace Expected Utility Metric Shown to Be a Valid, Reliable, Sensitive and Calibrated Predictor of Brand Preference

BrandEmbrace, a behavioral economics metric provided by Behavioral Science Lab, LLC (BSL), has completed the Marketing Metric Audit Protocol (MMAP), the formal process for validating the relationship between a marketing measurement and financial performance provided by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB). BrandEmbrace consists of qualitative and quantitative methodologies delivering driver diagnostics and a measure of Expected Utility motivating brand purchase.

According to Tony Pace, MASB President and CEO, “BrandEmbrace is the first metric assessed that has a qualitative component explaining brand preferences. This is a potentially valuable new option for marketers to understand their categories and discover motivating selling propositions.”

Frank Findley, MASB Executive Director and Chief Advisor to the MMAP Center, noted that the MMAP audit is the only independent, completely objective assessment for the validity of a marketing metric. “BrandEmbrace, by successfully addressing the MMAP set of empirical evaluation protocols, has entered an elite group of metrics with proven ties to financial outcomes.”

MASB is an organization of top-tier marketers, measurement providers, industry associations and business academics devoted to establishing and advancing accountable marketing practices that drive business growth with tools like the MMAP Metric Catalog and the Continuous Improvement in Return Assessment.

Also Read: Speedo Launches Swimming into the 21st Century with Amplience

Christian Goy, BSL Co-founder and Managing Director, praised the rigor of the MMAP process and commented, “We are delighted that the MASB audit has confirmed the value of our metric as experienced by our clients in predicting and managing brand switching, loyalty and share change.”

Behavioral Science Lab is an independent behavioral economics consulting firm providing BrandEmbrace and related diagnostic and instructional services to clients globally.

Commenting on what drove BSL to develop BrandEmbrace, Tim Gohmann, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer and Ron Mundy, Co-founder and Chief Operations Officer reflected, “When developing BrandEmbrace, we had only one goal — to model how and why humans make decisions without allowing our own biases to degrade our understanding.”

Tableau Appoints Gerri Martin-Flickinger, Starbucks CTO, to Board of Directors

By

prweb

-

February 2, 2018