Search
Home Blog Page 4333

TechBytes with Katie Bullard, Chief Growth Officer, DiscoverOrg

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
DiscoverOrg

Katie Bullard
Chief Growth Officer, DiscoverOrg

In 2017, better data drives marketing and sales ROI. However, when your B2B data decays at 70% year-on-year, how should CMOs justify investing in data management platforms (DMPs) and expect their CRMs to run accurately each quarter? Apart from data collection and management, it is equally important to cleanse data regularly. DiscoverOrg’s Marketo Connector puts your data cleansing and enrichment on auto-pilot , enabling Marketo users to build and leverage the world’s most integrated data platform.
We spoke to Katie Bullard, Chief Growth Officer, DiscoverOrg to understand how the marketing and sales intelligence platform delivers accurate insights based on automated and human-based intelligence to 4,000 sales and marketing teams allows brands to create 1:1 interaction with customers..

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

MTS: Tell us about your role at DiscoverOrg and how you got here.

Katie Bullard: I’m the Chief Growth Officer for DiscoverOrg, which means I’m responsible for identifying, prioritizing, and capitalizing on the biggest growth oppurtunities for the business from a product, partnership, and marketing perspective. My path has definitely not been linear! I started out in finance, city government, and urban planning/real estate strategy, and ended up in technology about 8 years ago. I think those experiences have really rounded out my ability to wear an enterprise hat, no matter the role I’m in.

MTS: Help us understand the concept of “Clean Data”. How can marketers benefit from “Clean Data” provided via Marketo Connector?

Katie Bullard: Data is literally the foundation of any successful marketing program. Even if you have the best content in the world, if you don’t have the right data to identify your top prospects and engage with them with the right message at the right time, you will never be able to contribute effectively to the company’s revenue goals. B2B data decays at a rate of up to 70% per year, so if you have a marketing database with 100,000 prospects, only 30,000 of those contacts will have the correct title, email, company, etc…within 12 months if you don’t have a process for keeping that data clean and accurate. Not only that, but dirty data leads to incredible challenges for the entire organization. When bad data ruins a company’s reputation and lands a domain on blacklists, marketers put growth for the entire company in jeopardy.

MTS: How can Marketo users improve the performance of their ABM campaigns with the new application?

Katie Bullard: The enhanced Connector supports effective ABM in 3 primary ways:

Step 1: The first step for marketers building a strong ABM program is to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP.)  Most companies are missing a lot of the data they need to do this effectively, and the DiscoverOrg-Marketo connector allows them to quickly append new and accurate data points from DiscoverOrg that they may not have already in their Marketo database–meaning their ICP analysis is more accurate and they can more quickly find lookalike prospects. Our team of researchers is gathering more than 70 data points on every company in our database at any given point in time–from standard firmographic info to technographics to department budget details and buying intent data.

Step 2: Additionally, no company stays the same –if they do, they probably aren’t a great prospect for you! When companies grow, when buying signals change, when technologies change, etc…you should have a process to stay on top of that and monitor and re-prioritize accounts appropriately and the Connector makes that process easier as data is automatically cleansed, enriched, and appended.

Step 3: Finally, ABM might be all about accounts, but at the end of the day, we are still engaging with and connecting with individual people at those target accounts. Most B2B sales include 3-6 decision-makers and influencers, so marketers need to identify the key buyer personas and contacts that are most important in your buying process. With the Connector, you can not only pull in the right contacts based on your unique criteria, but you can keep the data up-to-date automatically.

MTS: In 2017, B2B marketing and sales technologies are closing the gap on Data science and Customer Experience. How is DiscoverOrg poised to make this happen?

Katie Bullard: Successful marketing and sales teams have always figured out how to balance art and science. It’s not just about the number of conversations or demos, and it’s also not just about telling a beautiful story. It’s both. When it comes to sales and marketing technologies, the same is true, and DiscoverOrg has the right model to blend the human element and the science element. How? For DiscoverOrg, that means we will leverage advances in data science to scale and grow our database and buying signals exponentially faster than we’ve ever done before. The efficiencies that process delivers allows our research team to spend more time gathering the kind of buying insights that can’t be scraped off the web and validating the data we are gathering—guaranteeing a level of accuracy that no other data providers can promise. But just delivering great data isn’t enough for a great customer experience. Our customers want to know how, when, and where to use the data without having to jump between a million different systems. Our product roadmap is focused on building intelligent tools around the data that surface the right buyer at the right account at the right time and with the right message—all pushed directly into whatever CRM, marketing automation, or sales acceleration tool our customer is using.

MTS: Would the RainKing acquisition herald the trend of “singular automation” platforms for ABM and sales?

Katie Bullard: The continued convergence of data, predictive intelligence, and sales enablement technologies will continue to advance. This acquisition heralds the trend that has always been core to DiscoverOrg: that sales and marketing teams prefer quality over quantity and in the era of ABM, when it is so important to deeply understand the buying centers and characteristics of your target accounts, it’s no longer enough to just buy “lists” for your database. You need in-depth data like org charts, buying signals, technographics—and all of that verified by our in-house research team.

MTS: How do you see sales intelligence platforms evolving with the coming of age of data science and analytics?

Katie Bullard: It’s not enough to just provide data!

We have to make it easy for sales and marketing teams to consume that data in very meaningful ways that make them that much better at prospecting. I think we will see significant advances within sales intelligence systems as continuous feedback loops between multiple systems make it easy to proactively surface data that is both cleaner and more relevant.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Katie.
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 Chris Dobson, CEO, The Exchange Lab

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Chris Dobson
Interview with Chris Dobson, Chief Executive at The Exchange Lab

[mnky_team name=”Chris Dobson” position=” CEO, The Exchange Lab”][/mnky_team]
[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/chrisdobson_uk” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-dobson-5ba30a8/”]
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“As tech capability grows, brands may view machine learning as the answer to — and reason for — industry issues such as poor transparency and fraud even though all media has had its share of challenges in this area since advertising began.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at The Exchange Lab and how you got here.? (What inspired you to be part of a programmatic AdTech company?)
My media career has spanned client, agency, TV and digital, always seeming to move on, as consumers do, into new media opportunities. Having pioneered the social ad model with MSN Messenger at Microsoft, it was a natural evolution that took me into programmatic. Initially I held the role of Executive Chairman at The Exchange Lab and became CEO when we were acquired by WPP. I was eager to apply my experience in media and advertising, and put a stake in the ground in the belief that programmatic is the future of all media.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of programmatic advertising, how should brands build a unified adtech stack that covers measurement, verification and brand safety?
A unified adtech stack needs to consist of a number of layers. Not only should it encompass tools that enable brands to understand and reach consumers across multiple channels, such as advanced data management platforms (DMPs), but it should also include technologies that can accurately track performance and ensure brand safety.

As tech capability grows, brands may view machine learning as the answer to — and reason for — industry issues such as poor transparency and fraud even though all media has had its share of challenges in this area since advertising began. Following the recent brand safety scandals, it was all too easy to place the blame on the processes and automated nature of programmatic.

The IPA’s recent call to action for Facebook and Google to clean up their act in the online video space highlighted that the industry recognizes that tech giants should be held accountable for meeting standards of brand safety, measurement, and verification. But brands and agencies can’t rely on the duopoly alone to solve such challenges. They need to employ platforms and specialists with stringent security measures in place and third-party verification, which they can be assured prioritize these issues. The people component is particularly key, as companies need to be working with experts who ensure that data and insights are being fed back into the business to guarantee the brand remains safe.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage mobile and video advertising platforms to drive their digital transformation?
Video advertising is a rapidly expanding and a highly lucrative market. Last year revenues reached $5billion and as mobile accounts for a large proportion of time spent with digital video – about half an hour each day in the US alone – it is a vital medium for the format.

With such high potential returns, choosing the right advertising platform is key and this means there are a number of factors to take into account. As with all campaigns, reporting is a significant focus, especially when it comes to targeting and transparency. This means CMOs need to utilize platforms that provide in-depth insight into where their ads are placed and who they will reach. Mobile and video ads have been scrutinized in the past due to limited viewability reporting — particularly with the video ad serving template (VAST) unable to provide detailed analysis — and variations in ad formats and sizes. For mobile and video ads to truly make a tangible and positive impact in the digital space, the right software must be selected so that CMOs can assess the performance of each ad format, and make informed decisions about which ad types deliver the best engagement and return.

They should also consider the place video holds in the wider media mix; modern consumers do not distinguish between channels — their journeys are a mixture of touchpoints and devices — and budgets for video ad campaigns must therefore be included in cohesive omni-channel campaigns, rather than implemented in isolation. As a result, it’s essential for CMOs to select platforms that can consolidate data from multiple sources to both deliver and measure multi-faceted campaigns, and trace the effect of mobile video on other channels. Only then can they determine when, where, and how to deploy it for maximum results.

MTS: What steps should AdTech innovation companies take to bridge the gap between technology adoption and their expected ROI?
Keeping pace with the latest trends can be costly, as fast technological evolution and changing consumer behavior means advertising platforms must constantly be evolving. But this is where reporting and Business Intelligence becomes crucial. To ensure the value new tools can generate, brands must assess performance and attribution precisely. By measuring advertising campaigns against clear KPIs, brands can calculate the exact impact of each tool and its contribution to the bottom line. Thus, they will have a defined view of the ROI new technologies produce, and if they are underperforming, where changes can be made to realize their full potential.

MTS: Is programmatic effective for creative brands?
Without a doubt. Traditionally, many have fallen into the age-old Art vs. Science debate of pitting creativity and technology against one another – but programmatic and creativity should exist in harmony, not conflict. The industry doesn’t have to sacrifice one for the other, in fact, you could argue that the creative aspect is more important than ever within programmatic advertising.

Programmatic is a facilitator in the audience + environment + creative message mix – and with creativity, companies can take advantage of the targeting and message segregation technology brings.

Brands have to consider a multitude of factors such as whether a campaign is right for the device or channel, and the many alternating online variables that influence customer engagement levels. By leveraging online data to deliver dynamic creative – where creative is adjusted and adapted based on the consumer’s behavior – the data generated by an individual’s interactions can serve a highly personalized and relevant online journey and therefore deliver the highest level of customer experience.

Technology is only as effective as the people and talent behind it, creativity and programmatic should not exist in autonomy. Through a fusion of both practices, brands can achieve the best results from their ad campaigns.

Programmatic can also empower creative in the efficiency it provides. Machine learning saves time in areas such as sifting through vast quantities of data and other labor-intensive tasks. This time can be invested in creative solutions, to deliver personalized and relevant messaging, which will have a substantial effect on how audiences interact and engage with ads, ultimately driving ROI.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
There are no start-ups I’m looking at currently thinking ‘wow, they’re going to take over the world’. Most of today’s start-ups are more likely to be challenged than interesting. We’re coming to the end of a phase of start-up frenzy, all built around overlapping planes and high, undisclosed margins as the business model. Now a consolidation is occurring – take for example Verizon’s Oath, born out of the acquisition of Yahoo and AOL, Oath will see the consolidation of 50 tech brands and platforms under its hat. Industry start-ups considered to have unique and useful technology are being swallowed up by big agencies, disruptors and larger tech players. And others like Rocket Fuel, where the business model isn’t adding up, have had to opt for a quick-fire sell. The rest will disappear when the money runs out. The issue with today’s start-ups is that they’re very people-heavy and not focussed enough on the technology. You only have to check the websites to see that most make the same claims but not in enough detail for CMOs to truly understand the difference.

If I were to name a company I respect, I’d say The Trade Desk. CEO Jeff Green has built a bonafide business, with realistic sustainable margins and real growth. When he IPO’d, The Trade Desk lived up to the expectation Jeff had created within the market, and as such it will go from strength-to-strength.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Our marketing stack consists of many typical media and marketing tactics other B2B players utilize. However, we are lucky in that we also use Proteus, our unified programmatic platform, to run all our own programmatic campaigns. Within these we test our products including weather sync, video, social and native, and utilize partners to help amplify the content.

We have a CRM tool that is connected to our newsletters, email marketing and website, and we currently use Hootsuite for social. In addition to digital media, we take an omni-channel approach, and our belief has always been that marketing and communications are synonymous with one another. Our creative is designed in-house and we have an amazing team who consistently punch above their weight and deliver the best ROI for the business.

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
The most recent client that really stands out in my mind is Philips, the leading health technology brand. Earlier this year The Exchange Lab was appointed as its global programmatic partner as Philips recognized the need to partner with a specialist in this field.

Our activities, which span 44 markets, are responsible for creating consistency in Philip’s programmatic marketing to achieve optimum sales and awareness.

What’s great about working with Philips is that they completely understand the benefits of using our meta-technology, data outputs and insights to drive their business in diverse markets. Ensuring at all times that they are protected by optimum levels of brand safety and enjoy best practice in every region.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
AI is making a huge difference to both the way consumers live and to industry operational efficiency by allowing many processes to be automated. It’s vital for business leaders to look ahead and see the potential of new developments in technology, using its capabilities to support and drive their business. Automated document creation, for instance, can save a lot of time that would formerly have been spent on admin. This frees up time for employees to better apply their expertise elsewhere.

It’s keeping abreast of the way AI might affect the people-component of your organization that is essential for global business leaders. Humans need to adapt to working with AI technology, and certain industries must face the prospect that employment opportunities may be reduced or transformed beyond recognition as a result of such advanced technologies.

It’s not just the way that AI affects the company or industry it’s integrated into that should be considered, it’s also the knock-on effect that this might then have on other businesses. Take, for example, the car manufacturing sector – if electric cars and autonomous vehicles become the norm, manufacturers will need to equip themselves with new skills, but insurance companies – whose premiums will greatly reduce – and the oil industry – whose gas will no longer be necessary to run vehicles – will also be affected. All industries need to plan ahead for the potential impact of AI and for many it’s a case of rethink or fail. Global business leaders need to be driving this and are responsible for effectively future-proofing their operations.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Trust. I trust the people around me to do what they have signed up to do – it’s part of The Exchange Lab’s culture that employees – including myself – deliver against the commitments they have made. It’s also vital that this trust and solid work ethic is acknowledged by our partners and clients. The Exchange Lab prides itself on being a business others have faith in.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Interesting question. It’s funny how you don’t realize how many apps or tools you rely on until you’re forced to think about it. First up, would be the Barclays app, I do all my banking online from my phone; I also couldn’t live without Google maps or the Thameslink app that tells me just how late my train is going to be today; Uber in New York is essentially a survival tool for that city, especially if you need to get back to an airport; iPlayer, for both TV and radio; my British Airways app, as I tend to fly BA and organize everything on my phone, and, of course, now that I can talk to my Echo dot, I can ensure I get the best out of my Amazon music and video.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I’m a massive believer in storing documents I care about in Google’s Cloud and OneDrive, so I’m able to access them on all different devices anywhere in the world. The security of knowing these files are protected and available everywhere is a major part of my work productivity. In the old days if your hardware failed you were lost –  no more, thank goodness!

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
OK, I have to admit to being a hardcore science fiction fan, which I guess maybe explains my career choice and interest in machine learning and AI (2001 A Space Odyssey can teach us a thing or two!) I’m currently reading Moonseed, a Sci-fi disaster-theory novel by Stephen Baxter.

I consume books on my Kindle, which is another device I couldn’t live without, as it allows me to access content on whatever, wherever, and its battery lasts a month!

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Back at the start of my career as a wet-behind-the-ears graduate, I worked for Land Rover in Dubai. I had a mentor there who managed the Middle East office and taught me how to be culturally aware and work with different nationalities in the most effective way a multinational business can. This is advice that has seen me through my international career and certainly comes in useful when sitting at the head of a global company like The Exchange Lab.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
It’s got to be Jeff Green, CEO, The Trade Desk

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Chris” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e7311-4a6f”]

A senior leader at the forefront of the development of digital programmatic media who previously shaped and executed the global advertising , sponsorship and branded content cross platform monetisation strategy for the commercial arm of the BBC, and played a pivotal role in monetising Microsoft’s national and international content and social audience assets. This included the development of class leading strategy, media sales skill set and service focus in EMEA, Asia and NA. This success built on extensive national and multi-national media, agency and client sales, marketing and management experience in major multinational companies.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About The Exchange Lab” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e7311-4a6f”]


The Exchange Lab, part of GroupM [m]Platform, is a specialist programmatic company connected to the world’s largest marketplace. The company’s proprietary Meta-DSP–Proteus, unifies the top demand side platforms (DSPs), marketing technologies, media platforms and exchanges into a single touch-point, empowering direct advertisers and GroupM agencies with the highest level of efficiencies and analytics.

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

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

TechBytes with Steve Norall, Chief Product Officer, SurveyMonkey

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
SurveyMonkey

Steve Norall
Chief Product Officer, SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey recently unveiled its new People Powered Data platform that enables businesses to turn voices and opinions into actionable data. We spoke to Steve Norall, Chief Product Officer, SurveyMonkey, about how their new platform enables B2B marketers to engage with their customers.

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

MTS: Tell us about your role at SurveyMonkey and how you got here?

Steve Norall: I’m the Chief Product Officer at SurveyMonkey, overseeing product, growth marketing, and product marketing. I joined SurveyMonkey two years ago through the acquisition of TechValidate, a content automation software company that I co-founded in 2007. As an entrepreneur myself, I was drawn to SurveyMonkey because of the company’s ability to power people’s creativity, curiosity, and innovation.

Last year has been especially exciting as we’ve completely reinvented the SurveyMonkey brand to move beyond surveys into the People Powered Data space. We used this brand journey as a mandate to transform the whole company as we formulated a new mission to “Power the Curious.” We revisited products, processes, and procedures. Resulting from this work is an all-new look of our brand and products, and a portfolio of targeted solutions for businesses to gather customer-powered, employee-powered and market-powered data that we’ve recently unveiled: SurveyMonkey CX, SurveyMonkey Engage, and SurveyMonkey Audience.

MTS: How deep is SurveyMonkey into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)? How do you maximize the data’s potential to design surveys?

Steve Norall: Our new People Powered Data Platform enables businesses to turn voices and opinions into actionable data. With this platform, we are uniquely positioned to deliver the expertise, speed, and scale that businesses need to win in the competitive market place.

We do that by combining SurveyMonkey’s nearly 20 years of survey science expertise and billions of survey responses in our database with new technologies like machine learning, to help organizations quickly understand why things are happening. This is the unique advantage we can deliver in comparison with various big data solutions that uncover what is happening, but can’t always help make an informed decision as they aren’t good at discovering the why.

An example of a new feature powered by our expertise and a proprietary machine-learning algorithm is SurveyMonkey Genius. It essentially acts as a survey scientist that’s always available to you, analyzes your survey and predicts the performance by anticipating response rate and completion time before the survey is deployed to respondents. It also offers a list of actionable suggestions, so users can gather higher-quality data, and tips to avoid common mistakes. The best thing is: SurveyMonkey Genius keep learning and getting better the more it’s used. Following the launch, we’ve seen a 2.4x increase in survey deployments following with use of this feature, and customers are really excited about it, saying it adds real value to the products.

Another example is auto-tagging in SurveyMonkey CX where the machine learning software is able to read through open-ended responses and assign it a “category,” so that you can spot trends easily.

We’ll be embedding more and more of our expertise into future products and leveraging our unique data assets, so that all customers can benefit from that and get actionable People Powered Data quickly. We also plan to build up our Data Science capability and infrastructure, so that any engineer can envision, train, test, and operationalize data science models in our environment, and expand experiments with new tech.

MTS: What are the building blocks of SurveyMonkey’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology? Can NPS models be customized for B2B customers based on their business models?

Steve Norall: The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the world’s leading metric for measuring customer loyalty and happiness. It is a great metric to power customer insights because it’s benchmarkable, and in addition to that research shows that it is highly predictive of future growth.

For that reason, SurveyMonkey CX is based on the Net Promoter System. We took NPS to the next level by leveraging the prowess of our survey researchers and expertise in collecting customer satisfaction data. As a result, our methodology maximizes response rates and quality insights, helping businesses provide great customer experiences.

With SurveyMonkey CX, businesses get our industry-leading NPS Benchmarks built in and get instant information on how they compare to similar companies. Marketers, customer experience, and customer success professionals can trigger personalized surveys through multiple channels to reach customers when and where they are most receptive. They can also accurately measure customer loyalty and understand the drivers behind their business’ NPS to know exactly what actions will move the needle.

However, there’s more to NPS than just scoring overall customer satisfaction. Once businesses identify their Promoters, Passives, and Detractors through their NPS survey, SurveyMonkey CX enables them to close the loop with personalized follow-up communications to their customers. Whoever is managing the program can assign a team member to follow up with customers, message them directly and monitor conversations in CX, as well as sync NPS data into Salesforce.

Basically, powering your NPS program with CX gives you:

  1. Proven methodology, so the team doesn’t need special expertise to get great results, as well as customization for your business–for example, you can customize your key drivers + add follow-up questions;
  2. Automation: you can trigger surveys and eliminate manual work;
  3. Advanced and predictive analytics: understand trends, benchmarks, and benefit from predictive analysis of key drivers, revenue impact and more;
  4. Ability to close the loop: you get alerts, assign follow-up action within your team, and have direct conversations at scale with your customers.

MTS: In the era of social selling, how is SurveyMonkey firming up to deliver best-in-class customized branding and audience listening capabilities to marketers?

Steve Norall: Our new People Powered Data platform was created exactly for this purpose: to help businesses listen to the people who matter most—customers and employees—and meet their needs. First of all, we allow you to ask questions ( in fact have conversations at scale) in the most popular messaging and collaboration apps like Facebook Messenger and Slack with our new integrations. We’ll continue to expand the list to other popular social and collaboration platforms. This helps businesses reach customers where they are having conversations already and get instant feedback.

We also created a new survey-taking experience with a new mobile-first design, so that all surveys on our platform feel more like a conversation. In the US 35% of SurveyMonkey surveys are on mobile phones, and the percentage is much higher outside the US–almost 81%. So, it was extremely important for us to offer a mobile-friendly survey-taking experience and integrate with chats, social, etc. Our initial tests showed the value of putting respondents first with 12-20% higher survey completion rates with this new experience and 8% faster survey completion rates.

Finally, we are building targeted solutions for listening to customers like SurveyMonkey CX, and expanding the capabilities of our solution for market-powered data called SurveyMonkey Audience which businesses use to get real-time feedback from millions of people around the world. SurveyMonkey Audience has been redesigned and is now built directly into SurveyMonkey, making it easier than ever to do market research and get access to People Powered Data anytime, anywhere, and with any budget size. This self-serve market research tool is also now accessible to customers in more than 60 markets, supports over 30 local currencies, and is fueled by global panels in over 100 countries. It’s democratizing market research with 24/7 access, so businesses can run studies in minutes and get answers in hours or days instead of weeks or months.

GoPro, for example, uses SurveyMonkey Audience for a global brand awareness study to gather insights across 12+ countries and captures opinions from India or China or Japan as these markets are becoming big for GoPro.

Speed is really important for businesses when it comes to listening to their customers and the market these days. We see it play out in social media, where an understanding of the why (or a reaction to) behind certain developments or conversations is often needed within a few days, rather than months. This is what our solutions can offer at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research price.

MTS: How are features for customer experience different from the ones used for employee engagement? What makes SurveyMonkey CX different from the rest of the competition?

Steve Norall: Nearly 30% of our customers use SurveyMonkey to measure employee engagement, which is why we’ve developed SurveyMonkey Engage that’s launching later this year. This solution is based on our expertise to help HR improve business outcomes by building a fulfilling employee experience that creates happy, healthy, effective employees. Engage deploys a turnkey, data-driven methodology based on 5-key factors that measure engagement throughout the year, sets up recurring surveys to follow up on engagement regularly, etc. Similarly to SurveyMonkey CX which provides customer-powered data, this solution for employee-powered data offers compelling visualizations to help businesses quickly pinpoint areas of improvement and drill down further to get to the why: by team, function, location and more.

While the features of these two solutions are different because they are addressing different problems, both products help organizations understand experiences and take action on them: SurveyMonkey Engage for employees and SurveyMonkey CX for customers. Understanding these experiences is critical for today’s businesses and often what sets a business apart from its competitors.

These products both stand out from the competition because we leverage our expertise, speed and scale to help businesses not just get more value out of their data, but also take immediate action and close the loop with customers and employees. While a lot of enterprise solutions cost tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars, our powerful tools are also available at a reasonable price, both meeting your CTO’s security needs and your CFO’s budget.

What’s also interesting is that CX and Engage complement each other really well as one of the biggest drivers of high customer satisfaction is highly engaged employees.

MTS: What is your opinion on the automation of survey workflow? Do you think bots and intelligent assistants will completely replace customer feedback processes in the future? 

Steve Norall: Automation can certainly help drive conversations with customers at scale. We want our products to help marketers categorize, process, and understand the data more efficiently, and we’ve been implementing the latest technologies to do that, for example in our integration with Slack.

However, nothing can replace customer feedback.

No bot can predict or learn the varying and complex voices and opinions of people, and we want to help customers capture genuine feedback and make informed decisions to gain a competitive advantage.

We’ll likely use intelligent assistants more and more to eliminate simple, but time-consuming tasks to help businesses quickly turn information into action, but only where it really makes sense.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Steve.
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 Caroline Klatt, Co-Founder, Headliner

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Caroline (Stern) Klatt
Interview with Caroline (Stern) Klatt, Co-Founder, Headliner

[mnky_team name=”Caroline Klatt” position=”Co-Founder, Headliner”][/mnky_team]
[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/linistern” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-klatt-5b404323/”]
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“When you know exactly what customers want, you can market it to them. In chat, the customer is telling us exactly what they need, so we can translate that back in actionable, shoppable content.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be a part of an app personalization firm?
I am the Founder and CEO of Headliner Labs, which develops chatbot and mobile messaging technology for leading brands and organizations in retail. I spent years working in retail – as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and as an operator at traditional retail companies Steve Madden and Ralph Lauren, and as the Director of Strategy and Operations at a unicorn e-commerce startup, Fab.com. There’s no denying the fundamental shift in retail: shopping is moving digital.

The convenience of shopping anytime, anywhere, has transformed consumer habits. But e-commerce has a long way to go. The magic of walking into a store and having the personal attention and expertise of a salesperson hasn’t been realized online. And especially on mobile, scrolling through tiny little thumbnails of products doesn’t convert.

That’s where chatbots present a massive opportunity. We can deliver experiences that are native to mobile, accessible 24/7, and truly personal. I founded Headliner after I left Fab.com because I saw this huge opportunity and had to seize it!

MTS: How do you see behavior-based marketing enabling brands to deliver immersive, personalized experiences?
Every interaction in chat is immersive and personalized. We leverage a customer’s shopping habits, browsing patterns and expressed needs to serve up the right products and the most relevant content at the optimal time.

MTS: How should marketers leverage customer data analytics to improve their marketing campaigns?
When you know exactly what customers want, you can market it to them. In chat, the customer is telling us exactly what they need, so we can translate that back in actionable, shoppable content.

MTS: What drives brands to explore newer recommendation-based messaging experiences?
Ultimately, it’s about sales. Our bots succeed in driving meaningful sales to our customers’ sites where other marketing strategies haven’t performed. Our customers report increases in direct sales as great at 63 per cent month over month.

MTS: With the recent changes in data privacy policies, how do you see customer experience platforms coping with challenges in advanced visitor identification and tracking?
As long as brands are overt and receiving consent from their customers, data privacy policies aren’t problematic.
Digitally native customers are very comfortable sharing personal information with brands because they understand the benefits: brands can serve them better, more relevant experiences if they have the information to do it. Customers want truly these truly personalized experiences.

MTS: Would the heavy dependence on machine intelligence disrupt personalization and app messaging platforms? Should chatbots be considered as the pinnacle of messaging experience?
Chatbots are the future of brand to customer interaction. People fundamentally like to chat. You chat with friends, colleagues, family. The idea that brands would engage you differently makes no sense. Machine learning enables brands to deliver truly personal, conversational experiences at scale.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m watching all the chat platforms to see how the race for chatbots unfolds. Right now Facebook owns the space, but there are other great apps like Kik doing a lot in the space, and Apple will be rolling out a chatbot platform in the coming months.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Chatbots are the future of marketing! I’d say I’m pretty heavily invested in that…

MTS: Would you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
We ran an incredible campaign with an amazing accessories brand, Donni Charm. We built a smart targeting tool that identified likely customers and chatted with them. We used machine learning to serve every customer products they’d likely buy.

Donni Charm saw a 63 percent increase in sales during the campaign, that’s been extended for 12 months. 63 percent increase in sales!

That’s pretty unparalleled success, and it all came from the winning combination of our incredibly powerful platform and their gorgeous products.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
Embrace AI and learn how to get the most out of it! Artificial intelligence and machine learning are tools that help us as individuals, as business people, as consumers.

I want my calendar to schedule events for me. I want airlines to serve me the right flights based on my schedule, and I want brands to send me updates about products that I want, so I don’t have to do the leg work of searching myself.

As a business leader, I want to understand how AI can further me, my team and my company, and in our case at Headliner, how it can further my product.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work:
Nocturnally.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Facebook Messenger, Docsend, Instacart.

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Hire people who are smarter than you are. And answer emails as soon as you read them.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I get all my news through Messenger bots. It’s the best format for checking the headlines by section.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Always be a giver. Give time, give support, give connections, give in any way that you can. It never hurts to help other people, and it often comes back around.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I’m a big believer in collaboration. When you find good people – in your space or outside of it – figure out how you can work together to further everyone’s objectives.

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

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Caroline ” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108eded5-8bf3″]

Caroline Klatt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Headliner Labs, a NYC software platform company that specializes in eCommerce chatbots.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Headliner ” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108eded5-8bf3″]

headlinerlabs

Headliner is pioneering the path for mobile commerce, building the most personalized and engaging messaging experience for your customers. With over 400 billion people sending 250+ billion messages per day, your brand must have a lasting and comprehensive presence on messaging channels. Utilizing the most cutting-edge techniques in chatbot development, AI capabilities and conversational commerce methodologies, Headliner Labs specializes in building e-commerce chatbots for the beauty and fashion industries. Our first-in-class bots optimize for maximum brand impact, conversion through a sales funnel, and unique customer interactions.

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

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

TechBytes with Jim Sinai, VP of Marketing, Salesforce Einstein

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Jim Sinai
TechBytes with Jim Sinai, VP of Marketing, Salesforce Einstein

Jim Sinai
VP of Marketing, Salesforce Einstein

In the run up to Full Circle Insights’ Circulate 2017, we spoke to Jim Sinai, VP, Marketing, Salesforce Einstein, who is scheduled to speak at the event. In this interview, Jim shares his insights on companies revamping their data practices to be AI-first.

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

MTS: What brings you to Circulate 2017? Could you share the key takeaways from the event?
Jim Sinai:  There is an unprecedented opportunity for businesses everywhere to leverage AI to help employees work faster, smarter and more productively. I’m looking forward to diving into the conversation that AI is more than just hype and highlight how it can provide meaningful gains to marketing and sales. AI promises to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and I’m looking forward to showing how that promise is becoming reality. I’m also looking forward to engaging in conversations with customers to discuss where AI is today and what’s on the horizon in the months to come.

MTS: Salesforce Einstein will celebrate its anniversary very soon. How has this journey been so far?
Jim Sinai:  It’s exciting, to say the least. We’ve been laser focused on bringing AI to CRM and since its launch in September of last year, Einstein has made major strides in removing the complexity of AI and empowering Salesforce users of all skill levels to be smarter, more productive and predictive– without the help of a data scientist. Today there are 18 AI-powered features live across the entire Salesforce Platform and Einstein is already having a real impact for our customers of all sizes and industries. US Bank, for example is using Einstein to build a 360 degree view of its 18 million customers with Einstein, streamlining customer interactions in its contact centers and helping reps be more productive and deliver personalized experiences. Outdoor gear and outfitter Black Diamond is also using Einstein to improve online shopping experiences for its customers and has seen a 15% increase in revenue thanks to Einstein Product Recommendations. There is still plenty more opportunities for Einstein to streamline how we work and we’re looking forward to continuing that momentum in 2018.

MTS: How do you see enterprise infrastructure evolving with adoption of modern data science and intelligence tools?
Jim Sinai:  As AI continues to spread into the mainstream, every company will eventually become an AI company. As part of that, enterprise infrastructure will evolve to enable business users– not just data scientists or PhDs– to leverage AI in the context of their business and build AI-powered apps of their own. Behind all of this, companies that want to take advantage of AI must fully embrace the cloud and revamp their data practices to be AI-first.

MTS: How does deploying Einstein enable marketers and sales reps to achieve a unified vision of “customer experience”?
Jim Sinai: Whether opening an email, posting to social media, talking to a service rep or sales associate, consumers expect experiences that are personalized, consistent and relevant to them across all touch points. AI is crucial to achieving this level of personalization and with Einstein embedded directly into Salesforce’s leading apps for sales, service, marketing, commerce and more customer are armed with the predictive insights to understand when, how and with what information to engage with consumers, saving time and driving efficiencies. This is what Einstein Account-Based Marketing is delivering to our customers today.

MTS: What would be the next frontier for MarTech, once marketers have a firm grip on the results from a unified data management, analytics and automation platform?
Jim Sinai: Thousands of technology solutions make up the martech ecosystem today. And many companies are employing a lot of these products to solve specific needs. This causes internal confusion, data silo’s, fiscal loss and as a result, misaligned marketing communications. Companies are working towards unifying all of their data on a single platform like Salesforce, and are leveraging the power of AI to streamline their processes and improve efficiencies, while also enhancing the consumer experience. Before we can think about the next frontier, marketers need to address their current challenges by standardizing on a single platform, and by turning to AI in order to refine workflows and meet the needs of today’s savvy consumers.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jim.
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

Huawei to Demonstrate Industry-Leading Media Solution At IBC 2017 in Partnership with Nevion

By
MTS Staff Writer
-
0
Huawei to Demonstrate Industry-Leading Media Solution At IBC 2017 in Partnership with Nevion

Demonstration showcases SDN-based multi-tenanted media networking

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider is announcing a demonstration of an innovative broadcast media networking solution with Nevion, the architects of virtualized media production, at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam.

The demonstration of a multi-tenanted media network will show Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based service provisioning on Huawei switches controlled by Nevion’s VideoIPath with media edge adaption from Nevion.

SDN is a technology that enables network transformation. It improves network usage, simplifies network operation and maintenance, and automates deployment of network resources.

Marketing Technology News: Skafos.ai Appoints Jody Stoehr as Chief Revenue Officer as Part of Surging Sales Growth

A broadcast media network demands close to 100% availability. As part of this Huawei Routers, with their high speed Bidirectional Forwarding Detection & Fault Recovery capabilities, guarantee high link availability, reduced traffic faults, fast routing convergence and service recovery.

Jeffrey Gao, the President of Router & Carrier Ethernet Product Line, at Huawei said: “We are living in an omnimedia era. As a result, ensuring accurate, rapid broadcasting of news programs when facing the challenge of new competition has become vital. This collaboration with Nevion means we can help more media customers than ever before improve their network efficiency to keep up with digital transformation in this industry.”

Marketing Technology News: Ruby Has Triples Las Vegas Space to Support Accelerated E-Commerce Demand

The arrival of the 4K/8K era demands higher frame rates, which places even higher pressures on network timing and synchronization. Huawei’s 1588v2 PTP synchronization technology is industry-leading. This cost-effective solution will not need any additional devices, the network alone will be all that is required.

Marketing Technology News: Khoros Launches New Data Hosting Location in Sydney, Australia

Interview with Tom Fishburne, Founder and CEO, Marketoonist

By
Rohan Jagan
-
0
Tom Fishburne MIS

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

“We’re in the awkward adolescence of digital advertising, where powerful tools are becoming available but our mindset hasn’t quite caught up to the potential. That’s the friction I find funniest.”

On Marketing Technology

MTS: What led you to satirize the digital advertising industry?
I started parodying all things marketing because I was working in marketing and wanted to process some of the challenges I was grappling with. Digital advertising became a natural target because there is such a tremendous learning curve. I feel like we’re in the awkward adolescence of digital advertising, where powerful tools are becoming available but our mindset hasn’t quite caught up to the potential. That’s the friction I find funniest.

MTS: What role does humor/satire play in digital marketing?
Humor is disarming and allows us to communicate hard truths. The pace of digital marketing makes it particularly important to continually question what we’re doing and to separate the shiny new things from the approaches that can create real impact. Humor reminds us that we’re all in this together.

MTS: You said that this was one the best times in history to be in marketing. Could you expound on this?
Marketers have never had more powerful tools to reach audiences and tell our stories. Every year, a Virtual Assistants Marketoonistnumber of dizzying new technologies come along that Don Draper would have salivated over. And yet, it has also never been easier for consumers to tune out whatever we want to say to them. There’s no such thing as a captive audience. That creates a challenge, but it forces marketers to up their game, and to create things that really matter and stories that are worth sharing. It’s an incredible time to work in marketing it we accept that challenge.

MTS: How important is it for a marketer to have a sense of humor?
We’re working in times of flux and uncertainty, where the rules of marketing are constantly being questioned and re-evaluated. Marketers have to laugh at ourselves to learn from what doesn’t work. We have to continually question how we’re doing our jobs. I think humor help keeps us sane while doing that.

MTS: You talk about command and control in advertising. How much of that legacy thought is still around today?
I was brought up in the model of command and control advertising. My brand management training involved crafting just the right single-minded proposition and then controlling the message as tightly as possible. I think that legacy certainly persists, although we’re no longer in the world where committees review every tweet before they go out. In more organizations, I see the new model defined as “freedom within a framework”, but the legacy of command and control is hardwired.

MTS: In this era of short attention spans, how do you believe digital marketers could engage with customers?
I think it’s less important to create individual moments of breaking through those short attention spans, and more important to invest in consistent relationships with customers over time. In a world of short attention spans, there’s opportunity is thinking “serial” rather than “viral” — an ongoing cadence of communication where customers look forward to the next installment.

MTS: Why do you say that technology can’t save a boring idea?
Shiny new object Marketoonist

It’s tempting to get excited about the next shiny new thing, but this can lead to using technology as a crutch. I think that technology can amplify and extend ideas, but it can’t stand in place of ideas. Every organization has access to the same technology. It’s what marketers do with that technology that matters.

 

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m a big fan of Betabrand, a startup clothing company that describes themselves as “1% Fashion, 99% Fiction”. They set the bar high for storytelling, bootstrapping, and using digital tools to amplify their message to punch harder than their weight.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
With our client projects, the marketing stack really varies based on the size and complexity of the company. We recently worked with Marketo on a cartoon series about Account-Based Marketing that was managed and monitored by their own ABM Marketing Stack (how meta is that?) For our own Marketoonist cartoons, we use a relatively simple marketing stack with Mailchimp, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, WordPress, and Insightly.

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
Marketoonist LinkedinWe worked with LinkedIn on an effective cartoon campaign designed to get business professionals to rethink LinkedIn profiles. Using the insight that people use too many buzzwords in their profiles, we created a series imagining if people talked in real-life like they do in their profiles. For example, a woman asked her husband which boots made her look “more results-driven.” The cartoons were translated into a dozen different languages, syndicated one-at-a-time in LinkedIn markets around the world, and also collected in a Slideshare with survey data about buzzword use. The campaign more than tripled expected engagement rates.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
Part of being a cartoonist parodying the issues of the day is to comfortably admit when I don’t know the answer. I honestly don’t know how an AI-centric world will play out for business leaders, but I love brainstorming the potential pitfalls. One of my favorite cartoon themes is to exaggerate a future based on what is happening right now. For example, I illustrated a future conversation with a creepy version of Alexa. In general, though, I think it’s more important than ever for business leaders to define for themselves was it is that they uniquely do. That definition will continually change in an AI-centric world.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Playful

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
From a drawing perspective, I love drawing by hand, but I certainly use Photoshop throughout. WordPress and Mailchimp are indispensable to getting my cartoons into the world. Hootsuite and Google Analytics help me monitor how cartoons are resonating. Insightly is the backbone of business development in our studio.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
This is decidedly low-tech, but I carve out the first two hours of every day for deep-thinking creative time, with my mobile on Airplane mode and no digital distractions. I primarily use this time for cartoon idea generation, but it also grounds me for the twists and turns that come later in my day. It makes me more productive not only by providing the headspace for creative thinking, but also making me focused on what matters later in the day.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I usually have one non-fiction book (currently “On Writing”, by Stephen King) and one fiction book (currently “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman) going at a time. This is in addition to the short-form New Yorker, New York Times, and other reading that I snack on throughout the week.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Draw your V-1 marker. That’s the point of no return on a runway where a plane either takes off or it crashes. When I was wondering when to take the entrepreneurial leap to start my own business, David Hieatt of Hiut Denim advised me to draw my own V-1 marker. In other words, he urged me to write down what would have to be true in the future to make that leap. It took the emotion out of it. One I hit that marker, I jumped.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Chris Lindland, Founder of Betabrand

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Tom” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e776d-b3a6″]

Tom started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases as a student at Harvard Business School in 2000. His cartoons have grown by word of mouth to reach several hundred thousand marketers every week and have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times.

In 2010, He started Marketoonist, a content marketing agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons. Marketoonist create content marketing with a sense of humor for businesses such as Google, IBM, Kronos, and LinkedIn. Marketoonist is expanding with a range of cartoonists from the New Yorker and nationally syndicated strips.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Marketoonist” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e776d-b3a6″]

Marketoonist is a cartoon studio focused on content marketing with a sense of humor. We create marketoon campaigns designed to be content worth sharing. We’ve created content marketing campaigns for large organizations such as Google, Kronos, and GE, and start-up organizations such as Baynote, Lifestreet Media, and Get Satisfaction.

Marketoonist is expanding with a variety of cartoonists from the New Yorker and nationally syndicated strips. Marketoonist taps the talent pool of the world’s cartoonists for brands that need storytelling.

[/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.

Nevion Becomes a Cisco Solution Partner

By
MTS Staff Writer
-
0
Nevion Becomes a Cisco Solution Partner

Recent Nevion projects include integration with Cisco routers

Nevion, award-winning provider of virtualized media production solutions, announced that it has become a Cisco solution partner. The announcement follows on from recent high-profile projects involving both companies.

In the past two years, Nevion has worked successfully in key major European deliveries in which the switch fabric was supplied by Cisco, and the media edge along with the management and orchestration was handled by Nevion.

These projects have provided large-scale wide area and campus software defined media networks for national broadcasters. These networks have provided up to 4000 media circuits and aggregate capacity approaching 5 Tb/s.

Marketing Technology News: Khoros Launches New Data Hosting Location in Sydney, Australia

Bryan Bedford, Global Business Development, Strategy and Channel Lead, Sports, Media and Retail, at Cisco said, “Expanding our relationship with Nevion demonstrates the  growth in the industry and progress with multi-vendor interoperability. Working together, we can offer joint customers a full portfolio of the tools they need to launch new services quickly.”

Marketing Technology News: QU-in Helps Higher Education Campuses Reopen Safely

Andy Rayner, Chief Technologist at Nevion added: “We are pleased to formally cement our relationship with Cisco, already having a proven track record of delivering successful key projects for broadcasters and service providers together. Nevion is a firm believer in customer choice and working with leading switch vendors such as Cisco, means that our customers can decide the solution that best fit their needs.”

Marketing Technology News: Sky Partners with TVSquared to Show True Picture of TV Effectiveness

Vorsprung Durch Dmexco

By
Damian Ryan
-
1
Dmexco
@dmexco/Twitter

This week I attended the digital Disneyland that is Dmexco: 50,000 plus of the world’s digital business community descended in Cologne for what has proved to be, in my opinion, the best event in our sector. And digital paradoxes aside, technology can’t do this – sometimes you need real people and real time to engage.

It starts in London. In the queue to board the plane, there were a dozen digital business owners that you haven’t seen in ages. And that theme of camaraderie and “old mates are best” continued all the way to the center of Cologne. There you could be forgiven for administering more than your usual share of handshakes, high fives, and hugs as you were gradually joined by, what seemed like, everyone you’ve worked with since you were 25.

Dmexco impressed – terrifically organized event with a real emphasis on experience. Great speakers, the odd celeb, and over a thousand suppliers assembled across an area which is guaranteed to break your personal record of “steps taken today” on your smart phones.

Marketing Technology News: OpenText Automates Invoicing for Rosneft Deutschland

But there’s something else. A warmth – a general willingness from everyone there to engage, do business, have fun without any of the usual exhibition snobbery that can often serve to isolate and make some people feel awkward about asking questions, or requesting an audience, or in my case, politely demanding the attention of the founders!

So what of the themes –  I was pleased to see two of my favorite digital themes being discussed throughout the two days; Transparency and Blockchain.

Transparency is no longer an option for digital agencies, middlemen, vendors, and platforms – it’s a prerequisite. It’s completely broken. We were able to witness firsthand how some brands are discovering the food chain that can support digital advertising where sometimes 75% of budgets are carved up among layers of suppliers. It’s tantamount to arriving at some tinpot state where everyone has to be paid off for anything to happen except worse – these suppliers are computers programmed to rip off businesses and discredit the entire sector.

Blockchain is coming. If the first version of the web was all about “the information superhighway” and the second web was focused on social media, the next generation of the web (or Web 3.0) will be about control, security and truth.

Marketing Technology News: Adobe Survey Says That Voice and Screen Combined Are the Future

Whether it will be based on blockchain or not remains to be seen but where there is an appetite for change, things don’t take that long in the digital world.

Remember up until now we don’t own the data we generate on the Internet. Moving towards a new, decentralized web may be a solution. It’s going to be exciting to find out what happens next.

Moore Stephens used the opportunity of Dmexco to release our first quantitative study of the “marketing technology space” – the response has been instantaneously positive from vendors, media, and suppliers to the digital marketing sector. We look forward to building on this initial success and together with the digital community, continue to establish our credentials in this fast moving space.

Marketing Technology News: Airbnb Introduces New Search Capabilities for Business Trips

TechBytes with John Donlon, Senior Research Director, SiriusDecisions

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
John Donlon
TechBytes with John Donlon, Senior Research Director at SiriusDecisions

John Donlon
Senior Research Director, SiriusDecisions

In the run up to Full Circle Insights’ Circulate 2017, we spoke to John Donlon, Senior Research Director, Sirius Decisions who is scheduled to speak on data-driven marketing, at the event. In this interview, John shares his insights on increasing sales maturity.

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

MTS: What brings you to Circulate 2017? Could you share the key takeaways from the event?
John Donlon: I’m giving a keynote on how marketing organizations can become more data-driven. We’ll review the attributes of a data-driven marketing organization, how to assess your current level of proficiency and a process for improving your capabilities. I’m also sitting on a couple of panel discussions—one on the emerging role of the CRO, the other on growing marketing and sales maturity.

MTS: How do modern event intelligence and analytics help businesses to precisely execute digital transformation?
John: Marketing teams are using all sorts of intelligence to better inform their actions better than ever before. This includes major shifts like digital transformation, but also things like product-to-audience-centricity. Pick any closed-loop business process, and high-performing organizations are injecting data into every step—strategy, execution, and analysis.

MTS: How should organizations leverage their sales data to choose their content and enablement tools?
John: Sales data can inform what content is working and what isn’t and where in the buyer’s journey it’s most effective. It can look at things like training completed on enablement tools but then also the usage of the various pieces of content by reps and consumption of outward-facing content by the target audience. We’ve found that roughly 2/3 of all content goes unused, so insight into what to keep and what to toss is highly valuable.

MTS: What are the key tenets of modern data science and intelligence tools that help drive alignment between sales, marketing, and product teams?
John: The biggest factor is knowing what questions to ask—“What information do I need to run the business?” If sales, marketing, and product are aligned on the corporate goals, they can then start to dive into the insights they’ll need to drive their contribution back to the business. It may be different for each team, but if they stay focused on the business goals rather than vanity or curiosity metrics, then data science and intelligence tools can help uncover the answers.

MTS: What is the next frontier for MarTech when it comes to engaging partnership community and event collaborations?
John: While new technologies and platforms continue to emerge to enable forward-facing marketing (cloud, social, mobile, etc.), the next frontier to be conquered is data unification. The ability to bring disparate data sets together will be critical to gleaning insights from the aggregate information, and it’s an area that heretofore has largely been owned by IT. As marketing continues to manage more and more of the tech stack however, they’ll soon need to get more adept at joining those technologies in a way that facilitates analytics and bolstering marketing activities.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, John.
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 Ray Kingman, CEO and Founder, Semcasting

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Ray Kingman

[mnky_team name=”Ray Kingman” position=” CEO and Founder, Semcasting”][/mnky_team]
[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/Semcasting” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-kingman-a079b81/”]
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“The challenge of current digital attribution solutions is that they are built on datasets that force marketers to forecast a conclusion from a relatively small sample of data.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to start a technology innovation company?
We started Semcasting in 2009 to improve the fundamental quality and depth of data available to marketers for online and offline audience targeting.  Much of the data available then, and even now, is based on old census models, generic personas and loosely defined behaviors – much of it based on black box science. In our view, programmatic RTB platforms would quickly make data-driven audience targeting a standard. In order to capitalize, we acquired a startup analytics company whose platform used genetic algorithms. Our goal was to create deep insight from vertical data assets in the auto, finance, retail, healthcare, sports, and travel sectors.

This platform employed parallel processing and machine learning to sift through hundreds of variables and combinations of variables to find the key predictors of conversion behaviors. The beauty of our approach was that it essentially mimicked the human decision-making process. It employed multi-threaded statistical testing methodologies to make sense of massive data sets. It treated data in a more sophisticated manner than the typical Bayesian probability methods that are used in most online solutions.

In 2012, Semcasting made its data available online for the first time by augmenting IP address delivery points with offline household and business data. By bypassing the cookie and using IPs as the key for mapping transactions, Semcasting is able to create three times the match rates and is platform independent. Information from mobile, desktops, IoT devices and locations could all be linked to the physical world in a largely deterministic way. As a result, in addition to deeper insight into the vertical, we provide better reach and more robust audience targeting and attribution capability.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of marketing intelligence technologies, how do you see the omnichannel marketing attribution and analytics market evolving in the years to come?
Right now, the challenge of current digital attribution solutions is that they are built on datasets that force marketers to forecast a conclusion from a relatively small sample of data. Audiences that live behind the 30-40 percent match rates of the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, Apple or other “universal ID” solutions, make deterministic attribution impossible. Users are on home WiFi, businesses networks, mobile devices, out shopping and increasingly on smart TVs. An error multiplier occurs when the so-called “universal ID” is multiplied across the different “gardens” and “people on different devices,” resulting in an attribution equation that is, at best, probabilistic and at worst, little more than wishful thinking.

Marketers can only fix this problem by keying off the user’s point of engagement and linking it with a common DNA element to offline CRM records, ad networks and mobile usage — all at scale. You need a common DNA element to link devices, platforms, and postal addresses together.

Attribution is in high demand by brands and agencies today. It will remain an open issue until it is able to be performed deterministically across channels on most campaigns.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage intelligent audience targeting technologies to scale the challenges in B2B marketing campaigns?
With programmatic audience-based display advertising, B2B marketers have increasingly moved online — taking their mailing lists and turning them into digital contact lists through the onboarding process. The results of matching a business file to cookies or digital IDs is typically underwhelming. Businesses scrub third-party cookies and decision makers are hidden behind the network. A perfect storm of no scale or accuracy!

In order to connect with a target prospect in a company and reach enough unique users to create scale, alternative tactics like IP targeting are required.

One of the benefits of IP targeting is that onboarding a file to IPs will, in most cases, return a match rate above 80 percent. Furthermore, the IPs can be identified to precise locations. With mobile in particular, this resolution to a location allows marketers to reach many target audiences, both at work and at home. Some call this cross-device, but cross-device without full transparency to the business and household connection is just audience extension.

B2B online display is moving beyond one-dimensional inbound tactics and taking on a more robust form of qualified outreach. When you onboard your prospect lists or turn your website visitors into a mailing list, you contribute to a proactive digital lead generation model for your business. The IP mapping of locations and devices makes this all possible.

MTS: How should CMOs plan their stack integrations to maximize the benefits from predictive analytics and AI-assisted audience analytics platforms?
This isn’t news to anyone… at the very top of the market, the largest national brands are just now starting to investigate the possibilities of AI. Predictive modeling took a long time before it made its way from credit card direct mail to real-time look-alike modeling based on campaign impressions. I suspect that it will take a while longer before Watson-inspired marketing makes it to the mainstream.

In the meantime, CMOs, brands and agencies should test before they buy.

MTS: What startups in MarTech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m not. I am more interested in the drivers of change in the select verticals themselves – such as healthcare. Affordable Care Act (ACA), medical research, prescription data, disease states, treatment options and health resource allocations make for a very deep data set that needs to be understood in order to improve results. Both consumers and the providers contribute to this information and they do it at scale. Executed with appropriate privacy safeguards, medical and healthcare data could be a key asset in driving better care coverage at lower costs. Well-targeted marketing represents cost savings and better outcomes in the long run.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?
Over the past two years, we have partnered with a leading digital automotive platform and other aggregate publishers to help dealers better understand the value of the third-party automotive site audience. We compiled a comprehensive data analysis for all dealers that we’ve completed attribution studies with in Q1 of 2017 for a leading digital automotive platform.

Through our process and methodology, we started with the dealer’s data management software (DMS) transactional data (Sales and Service), and then matched it to the IP address of the consumers in the dealer’s market, anonymized their private information and then cross referenced against the anonymous IP data supplied by the leading digital automotive platform.

Once we identified the matching sales and service transactions, we then looked back five years in the dealer’s DMS data to see if the customer had ever previously purchased or serviced with that dealer – and what kind of purchase and service was performed.

After compiling and analyzing the data we collected from over 150 dealerships across the US, we found that the digital automotive platforms influenced over 60 percent of the average dealership’s consumers. The platform also influenced an average of 63 sales per month per dealer. That’s 63 sales per month per dealer that hadn’t purchased or had serviced from/with the dealer previously in the last five years.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Walk-a-Bout

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Nothing exotic: Excel, Word, Gmail and my iPhone

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Read everything.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I read most of the Boston Globe each morning. I listen to NPR during my drive times and watch news commentary shows in the evening. I’m also currently reading “Worthy Fights” by Leon Panetta and “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received — your secret sauce?
“Kill what is in front of you.”  Address challenges head on and don’t procrastinate and let issues fester. Assume responsibility for your actions.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Lead investors in the AI and MarTech category.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Ray” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108ec830-9dc8″]

Ray Kingman co-founded Semcasting, Inc and serves as Chief Executive Officer. An experienced innovator in the content management and data visualization spaces, Kingman directs Semcasting, Inc’ day-to-day operations, the expansion of product offerings and the development of strategic relationships. Kingman has also served as Chief Executive Officer of LightSpeed Software. He transformed LightSpeed Software through the acquisition and integration of firms in the XML categorization and classification, search, analytics, content management, authoring and portal platform spaces.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Semcasting” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108ec830-9dc8″]

semcasting
Semcasting is a primary analytics and data provider for online display advertising and offline direct marketing solutions. Our patent-pending IP Zones targeting enables marketers to define an audience using automated predictive analytics and convert them to qualified target-ready online audiences. Our offline compiled data for the U.S. consumers is used by the top consumer marketing organizations in CRM and database marketing platforms for customer intelligence and prospecting solutions.

[/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.

NexGuard and Nevion Partner to Identify Distributions Paths of Live Broadcasts With Network ID Watermarking

By
MTS Staff Writer
-
0
NexGuard and Nevion Partner to Identify Distributions Paths of Live Broadcasts With Network ID Watermarking

NexGuard, a Kudelski company and the leading provider of forensic watermarking technology and solutions, and Nevion announced their collaboration to implement the Network ID product, which will debut at IBC 2017 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands on September 14-19, 2017).

NexGuard’s Network ID solution inserts a unique invisible and robust forensic watermark in primary distribution feeds for linear TV, be it satellite, cable or fiber. The watermark provides clear evidence of the distribution path to determine the source of illegally distributed signals (e.g. for live sports broadcasts). This allows the content owner to focus their anti-piracy efforts on the sources of significant piracy. The Network ID watermark also serves as proof of ownership to enable the take down of pirated streams (e.g. from social media).

Marketing Technology News: Khoros Launches New Data Hosting Location in Sydney, Australia

The Network ID solution has been designed for today’s global mission critical broadcast systems and has already been integrated in some of Nevion’s media nodes, which are widely used by broadcasters and service providers across the world, both for production and distribution applications. The Network ID functionality allowing the media nodes to insert the watermark into the signals in real-time before forwarding these onto the transport network.

Andy Rayner, Chief Technologist, at Nevion explained: “Nevion equipment is trusted by leading broadcasters and service providers across the globe to transport broadcast signals reliably and securely in real-time over considerable distances. Almost every significant live sport event relies on Nevion equipment for example. It makes total sense for us to work closely with NexGuard to implement their Network ID solution into our media equipment to provide our customers with even greater security for their valuable content.”

Harrie Tholen, Managing Director at NexGuard, said: “Tracing illicit content activity is a necessary and critical first step in fighting today’s greatest piracy challenges, such as the illegal re-distribution of live sports. NexGuard is honored to be working with Nevion to provide a solution that is pre-integrated with today’s TV & Media industry workflows. Network ID offers a clear indication of the sources of piracy, so that rights holders can focus their anti-piracy efforts where it matters.”

Marketing Technology News: Skafos.ai Appoints Jody Stoehr as Chief Revenue Officer as Part of Surging Sales Growth

Based on the world’s leading forensic watermark

NexGuard forensic watermarking adds a unique, invisible identifier to video content. The watermark remains with the content, even in the case of transcoding, resizing, downscaling, recording by camcorder or any other alteration before illegal re-distribution.

The Network ID watermark can be detected through the NexGuard online detection portal, a scalable, automated detection service. As a complement to Network ID, NexGuard’s sister company NAGRA offers a comprehensive set of global anti-piracy monitoring & take-down services for Web, IPTV/Kodi and social media piracy.

Marketing Technology News: Ruby Has Triples Las Vegas Space to Support Accelerated E-Commerce Demand

Nevion Integrates TICO Lightweight Compression Into Its Virtuoso Product Line

By
MTS Staff Writer
-
0
Nevion Integrates TICO Lightweight Compression Into Its Virtuoso Product Line

Nevion is now an adopter of the ultra-low latency TICO compression technology developed by intoPIX, enabling high resolution video over IP networks

intoPIX, an innovative technology provider of video compression solutions, welcomes Nevion, one of the world’s leading providers of media transport solutions for broadcasters, amongst the rapidly increasing list of TICO-enabled equipment manufacturers and solution providers.

Submitted as SMPTE RDD35, TICO is an advanced, visually lossless compression technology designed to be the standard for moving live content efficiently over IP networks. Widely used in the broadcast industry, TICO is a disruptive technology enabling compatibility and interoperability between manufacturers and broadcasters.

Marketing Technology News: Skafos.ai Appoints Jody Stoehr as Chief Revenue Officer as Part of Surging Sales Growth

Nevion is adding TICO capabilities as a media function to its Virtuoso software-defined media node. Virtuoso provides real-time IP adaptation, compression, protection, monitoring, aggregation and signal processing functionality, which can be changed and upgraded through software.

The new Virtuoso media function enables TICO UHD/4K encoding and decoding for transport over 10GE/IP or 3G-SDI video links, with a visually lossless 4:1 compression ratio and a latency of a few milliseconds. The Virtuoso solution offers multi-channel bidirectional TICO UHD/4K compression in a compact 1RU media server.

Marketing Technology News: Ruby Has Triples Las Vegas Space to Support Accelerated E-Commerce Demand

“We are seeing a growing interest in UHD/4K in live production amongst our customers,” explains Johnny Dolvik, Chief Product and Development Officer at Nevion. “One of the big challenges for broadcasters and service providers is the bandwidth required to transport UHD/4K video signals. TICO compression enables them to transport pristine quality video using the same bandwidth as currently used for uncompressed 3G high definition with a minimal effect on latency. So adding TICO to Virtuoso’s existing JPEG 2000 and H.264 compression capabilities made a lot of sense for Nevion.”

“Nevion’s decision to extend its technology portfolio for the Virtuoso platform with TICO compression capability, marks yet another important step in facilitating the adoption of the new UHD/4K workflows by the broadcast industry.  Whether implemented on the new IP networks or existing 3G-SDI infrastructure, broadcasters will enjoy superb video quality transport with virtually zero latency.” said Gael Rouvroy, intoPIX CEO and founder.

Marketing Technology News: Khoros Launches New Data Hosting Location in Sydney, Australia

The 3 Biggest Challenges Marketers Will Face in the Next 5 Years

By
Judd Marcello
-
0
Question marks

The modern customer demands authenticity in a brand relationship. Yoplait learned this the hard way after trying for years to launch a successful Greek product to rival upstart Chobani’s massive success. Now, the New York Times reports, Yoplait has stopped trying to compete with industry trends and shrewdly looked within to its own French roots. Yoplait’s upcoming launch of Oui, a specialty product crafted using an old French method, is an example of when a brand cuts through industry noise to reclaim its own power.

Yoplait’s adaptation reminds us that in today’s consumer-centric world, the brand is the business. What consumers don’t see is the legwork behind brand authenticity. Faced with an onslaught of data points, channels, and campaigns, marketers must combine artistry and analytics to present trustworthy, engaging brands. Kathleen Hall, Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of the brand, advertising, and research, had it right when she recently told Marketing Week that “fundamentally, marketing is about simplification and distillation.”

That can be a daunting task considering the tsunami of martech point solutions that have flooded today’s market. To marry marketing efforts with authenticity in today’s ever-changing consumer-driven world, today’s marketers must operate like tomorrow’s tech masters and industry leaders, overcoming three crucial challenges their forebearers never saw coming.

Mastering the Customer Relationship

Raised on the likes of Amazon and Zappos, customers expect a consistent, almost instantaneous experience across all online and offline channels and points of engagement. A recent Econsultancy survey found that “digital-native” cultures today can only thrive in customer-centric models, meaning all other models are moot. A marketing team must find a way to recognize and predict customers needs so intimately that the brand organically connects across an always evolving range of channels. Data used effectively positions the customer first, thereby satisfying increasingly complex expectations and securing brand loyalty.

Owning Strategic Vision

The CMO plays a larger-than-ever part in owning the company’s go-to-market strategy. This revolves around customer acquisition, retention, and repeat business. It’s a growing role for an executive traditionally focused only on product commercialization. In fact, the job description is expanding so quickly that there is no “clear, widely accepted answer on what a CMO actually does,” according to the Harvard Business Review. Now one of the most diverse, multifaceted roles in business, the CMO must master the orchestration of many moving parts — both in terms of traditional marketing and customer success — in order to create lasting business outcomes.

Adopting Technology Built by Marketers, for Marketers

Most marketers today use solutions that are pieces of a patchwork of larger clouds designed for sales, operations, and other non-marketing functions. The side effect of trying to force such clouds to work for marketing purposes is that departments end up with Frankenstack infrastructures that aren’t innovating around the marketer’s needs. Using a unified, purpose-built marketing platform will save uncountable hours of time and headache, and allow marketers to integrate best-of-breed applications that will work for their unique needs. A platform built from the ground up by marketers, for marketers will adapt to the growing role, and set up marketers for success.

To forge profitable relationships well into the future, marketers must take a bird’s-eye view of the three aspects above and iterate accordingly. The challenges ahead are real, but not insurmountable. Marketers who learn to balance complexity with consumer demands will lead intelligently, efficiently and with authenticity … and win more often.

Alos Read: More Than Half of Consumers Frustrated by How Brands Approach Engagement Today

TechBytes with Andrew Caravella, VP, Strategy & Brand Engagement at Sprout Social

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Sprout Social

Andrew Caravella
VP, Strategy & Brand Engagement, Sprout Social 

Speaking at Dmexco 2017 on Wednesday, Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, P&G, said it was high-time brands start investing in adtech for brand safety, transparency, and ad viewing. We spoke to Andrew Caravella, VP, Strategy & Brand Engagement at Sprout Social, to understand how the adoption of bots in social media can also result in the success of marketing automation platform.

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

MTS: Tell us about your role at Sprout Social and the team you work with?

Andrew Caravella: As VP of Strategy and Brand Engagement at Sprout, I work with our customers and partners to ensure we’re building strong relationships, growing our community and providing insight into trends affecting social business. Our team here works with customers of all sizes and strategies, from a local business focused on customer care to a global agency managing social across numerous brands and markets.

MTS: With growing focus on social selling and ABM, how do you see Bots as a justified martech investment for B2B sales?

Andrew Caravella: Turning to chatbots is well worth the investment in today’s e-commerce and social selling environment. Social media is consumers’ top choice for seeking customer service support and as a result, customer service teams are fielding an ever-increasing volume of requests. Chatbots alleviate that struggle by efficiently gathering all necessary details of each customer issue, then handing over a fully-formed case to a human customer service agent to offer support. It’s a perfect example of what happens when man and machine tag team in the right way.

MTS: To what extent do chatbots influence people-based marketing strategies?

Andrew Caravella: Social has become an important tool for people-based marketing, empowering brands to interact with consumers and provide more immediate, satisfying customer care—even before issues arise. Chatbots enhance brands’ ability to provide customer care via social by starting the conversation, setting clear expectations, collecting necessary information and ultimately determining the nature of an inquiry before transitioning a conversation to a human agent if needed. This ensures customers are getting the highest quality customer service in a fraction of the time of traditional customer service strategies.

MTS: What is the correlation between chatbot adoption and the success of marketing automation platforms?

Andrew Caravella: High consumer demands for exceptional experiences at every touchpoint have driven marketers to integrate innovative technologies into their marketing strategies. Marketing automation has allowed marketers to provide personalized experiences more efficiently and effectively to meet this consumer demand. Chatbots have gained traction for the same reason. They enable brands to provide better, faster customer care at a higher volume.

MTS: With bots exemplifying customer experience in social media, what are the biggest challenges in deploying them along the customer journey?

Andrew Caravella: Brands are often challenged to find and integrate a reliable bot technology that will maintain a high degree of customer service at any touchpoint along the customer journey. The horror stories aren’t hard to find – there are plenty of examples of bots gone bad. That’s why Sprout’s Bot Builder takes a rules-based approach to automating conversational workflow on Twitter Direct Message and Facebook Messenger. We took this approach because we believe it’s important for brands to maintain full control of the conversation. With rules-based bots, brands enjoy full transparency and full control of the customer experience every step of the way.

MTS: How deep is Sprout Social into AI/ML? How should marketers leverage these technologies to harness and optimize bot performance?

Andrew Caravella: When people are talking about bots, they often think of artificial intelligence or machine-learning. But that isn’t the case here—Sprout’s Bot Builder facilitates the creation of simple, rules-based bots to automate conversational workflow.However, the bot isn’t learning or generating those messages itself. Instead, brands and agents can automate messages while retaining complete control of the conversational flow. Later this year, we plan to release a version 2.0 that will support more complex interactions and enable the brand to configure multiple pathways for the bot conversation that go several layers deep, all still built with rules-based logic.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Andrew.
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 Gladys Kong, CEO, UberMedia

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Gladys Kong

[mnky_team name=”Gladys Kong” position=” CEO, UberMedia”][/mnky_team]
[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/gladyzzz” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/gladyskong/”]
[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Location intelligence is becoming easier to access and the insights are becoming more actionable. Barriers to entry are lower and will continue to ease, to the point where businesses in all verticals and at all stages of maturity will find applications for it.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to be part of a technology innovation company?
I came to the US from Hong Kong when I was a teenager. I had learned English primarily from books and practiced it only in a classroom environment, so when I arrived in this country, I naturally gravitated to STEM subjects because they didn’t depend as heavily on English proficiency. I also enjoyed them, and my confidence built as I excelled at them.

My love of math and science led me to Caltech and then UCLA, where I continued to concentrate on STEM. By the time I finished my degrees in math and science, I knew I would pursue a technology-related career.

After serving in leadership roles at Idealab and other tech companies, I came to UberMedia in 2012, where I served three years as CTO for three years before succeeding Bill Gross as CEO.

When I joined UberMedia in 2012, our small (but mighty!) team pivoted UberMedia from a social media app developer to an early pioneer in mobile advertising technology. I am very proud that we provide some of the highest quality mobile data solutions to power advertising, attribution measurement, and data insights. Our unique mobile location intelligence engine refines, analyzes and contextualizes mobile data to creatively solve persistent business challenges in a way that has never been done before — and we accomplished this with a talented and diverse workforce, and a lot of dedication and hard work.

We’re already in a completely different ecosystem than when I joined UberMedia, and I expect the pace of change to only accelerate in the next five years. Being in the mobile space means that UberMedia must constantly innovate. That’s what makes our work so inspiring and gratifying.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers, how do you see the marketing automation and location analytics market evolving by 2020?
I think the evolution will happen in two ways. First, marketers will continue to improve their use of location analytics for targeting media spend and measuring advertising effectiveness. For every present-day use case in targeting or attribution, there are layers of sophistication and optimization that marketers will realize through their accumulated experience and the maturation of the tools themselves. That’s an evolution of depth.

The second form of evolution will be in breadth.

By 2020, marketers will have incorporated mobile location data into their solutions in a seamless manner. No one should have to draw a bounding box to target local customers. The optimal targeting area should be determined by leveraging mobile location data of customers in recent time. There will be a lot more built-in intelligence in regards to targeting and attribution.

We are already seeing the beginning of this trend, businesses across a wide spectrum are starting to use location data to help make decisions. Location intelligence is becoming easier to access and the insights are becoming more actionable. Barriers to entry are lower and will continue to ease, to the point where businesses in all verticals and at all stages of maturity will find applications for it.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage mobile advertising platforms to drive their digital transformation with greater authority?
CMOs need to be aware of a few major trends that are currently reshaping advertising. First, mobile will take center stage (finally) as the primary tool in the marketer’s toolbox and as the primary venue for brand messaging. Whereas only a few years ago mobile was an afterthought, smart marketers are already concentrating the bulk of their creative efforts in this channel.

The logic is simple: consumers are also devoting more and more of their time and attention to mobile.

Second, the prevalence and accuracy of location data is making offline attribution a real possibility for marketers. CMOs should pay close attention to the power of location data in guiding and validating their media spend across all verticals. Measuring and optimizing on real-world location visits (foot traffic) will be a no-brainer as advertisers demand accountability to business metrics.

Last but not least, knowing your competition is the key.  CMOs need to understand not only their own foot traffic trends, but also their competitors’ by leveraging mobile location data to do foot traffic market share analysis

MTS: Given that mobile location data is considered the connective link between advertising and real-world business outcomes, how should CMOs plan their media investments to drive real-world foot traffic?
Despite the rise of e-commerce, the majority of real-world business outcomes still occur in offline environments beyond the reach of digital attribution models. Mobile location data is closing that gap.

In the last few years, UberMedia has released multiple innovations linking business efforts and results to actual location visits from consumers. These products include Location Visit Optimization (LVO), a system that dramatically boosts relevance and performance of mobile ad campaigns based on real-world location visits; Location Return on Investment (L-ROI), a first-of-its-kind key performance indicator measuring and optimizing mobile media against offline store visits; Cross Media Location Visit Rate (xLVR), enabling marketers to understand their incremental foot traffic lift and market share gains and losses across all media investments; and Optimal GeoSpace, a patent-pending mobile location technology that dynamically renders a customized virtual fence around individual retail shopping areas, enabling retail marketers to fully capitalize on the actual footprint of a customer to their location (or a competitor’s location).

In June, we announced the launch of Vista, the most comprehensive suite of data analytics tools for businesses of every size to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses through the lens of real-world foot traffic analysis, shopping patterns, and customer insights. Providing a panoramic view of actual business performance, Vista reveals in-depth analysis of consumer foot traffic behavior across industries by leveraging one of the largest mobile generated location data sets and the most precise location identification technology currently available.

Vista is a critical brand diagnostic tool that provides marketers with a clear visual on how well their brand is competing across key markets, verticals, and media outlets. This includes category-wide location analyses and consumer insights, ranking the performance of specific brands in the marketplace. Vista’s mobile location data analysis is helping businesses evolve to enhance services, address challenges, and plan for the future, including which locations they should open (or close) to attract the largest amount of foot traffic.

These are just a few examples of how location data is tying digital spend to offline activity in a way that gives marketers and businesses a more complete understanding of the entire customer journey.

MTS: How does UberMedia’s Location Visit Optimization (LVO) optimize location data and machine learning capabilities to deliver targeted ads? Are you leveraging programmatic technologies along with LVO for ad delivery and visibility?
Location Visit Optimization (LVO) optimizes mobile ad campaigns toward offline visits to a target location(s), such as retail stores, quick service restaurants, auto dealer lots, shopping malls, movie theaters, and the like.

This is a real development, and its transformative impact on marketing is hard to understate. To date, the majority of digital campaigns have been measured and optimized on the basis of online behavioral outcomes such as impressions, CTR, time on brand web traffic, online conversions, the list goes on. All these metrics failed to capture the ultimate forms of conversion, the majority of which still take place offline. LVO enables businesses to optimize on what matters most: real-world retail traffic and events.

The reason this hasn’t been done to date is twofold. First, LVO requires that a majority of users actually generate location data, which wasn’t a reality until smartphones reached a certain threshold of market saturation. We reached that point only a few years ago.

Second is that it is that optimizing media to real-world locations is just very, very difficult — relying on an incredibly complex and sophisticated process. UberMedia’s LVO uses and requires high volume accurate location data, heavy-duty computing power, machine learning, and algorithms to connect the process to programmatic bidding tools and mobile ad serving.

MTS: What startups in the MarTech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m keen on tech startups that are forward-thinking and innovative. Data and AI are both going to be huge factors shaping the future of marketing and businesses in general. Companies that are focused on bringing AI into their technology or making data easier to use and digest are very interesting to me. Two such companies that I’m watching are1

Faraday which makes it easy to apply cutting-edge predictive technology and built-in big data to your B2C business and Nugit transforms business data into decision-ready reports which are easy for people to understand and share.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We’re a start up and don’t currently use outside vendors for marketing support. We’re more grassroots in our marketing approach. We use Slack, and social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, we do depend on our own proprietary components as well as various technology vendors, including –

  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Hadoop
  • Elasticsearch
  • RabbitMQ
  • MySQL
  • Esri ArcGIS

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
When Adidas released the Adidas PureBOOST X, an innovative running shoe specifically designed for women, they turned to UberMedia to create an award-winning mobile advertising campaign specifically designed for women.

Partnering with Aadidas and Carat, we deployed an industry-leading mobile advertising campaign, inspiring women who lead active, healthy lifestyles to purchase the Adidass PureBOOST X, a “high performance meets high fashion” running shoe for women. UberMedia’s PureBOOST X audience was created using mobile location history, app usage signals, and interest cues to identify actual women who embodied the PureBOOST X message: I AM POSITIVE ENERGY, and drive them to specific retail locations that carried the shoe.

UberMedia’s primary objective for Adidas was to drive consumers to adidas.com and specific Adidas retail locations that carried the shoe by targeting female athletes with high-impact PureBOOST X creative. UberMedia also sought to measure adidas’s mobile investments against real-world foot traffic, measuring the influence that adidas advertisements had on actual store visits.

Ultimately, our success was based on both influenced location visits and creative user engagement. We influenced more than 30,000 visits in-store as a direct result of our mobile advertising campaign. Additionally, our dynamic creative saw significantly higher than average engagement rate. Due to this success, UberMedia and Carat were named “Best Mobile Campaign” in the ThinkLA 2017 IDEA Awards.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as the CEO of a technology innovation company?
Today, every company needs to be thinking about AI. Automation is a fact of existence, and an imperative of the future. Only 15 years ago it was only the most groundbreaking companies that thought ahead about internet strategy. Now every company has one, and we take for granted that the modern enterprise is built around the web. The same thing will happen with AI. The only question is how prepared your company will be for the inevitable.

One of the key component of AI is data, and as a data and technology company, we will to continue to find ways to apply our data to help advance the world of AI.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Inclusive — I strongly believe that a workforce built on healthy collaboration and the free exchange of ideas is the strongest foundation for any successful business, especially a startup, where being nimble and creative in our strategy and execution is a key marketplace differentiator.

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

  • Slack is essential to my daily life and the way I stay in touch with my team
  • The Wall Street Journal, to stay on top of the latest business, technology, and world news
  • Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, I like to stay active on social media and in close touch with my peers
  • Candy Crush, I’ve been an avid player for many years
  • Google photos

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
A strong communication pipeline is the smartest and most effective fast-track to getting things done and excelling at productivity.

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

  • “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow
  • “Coach Wooden and Me: 50 Years of Friendship On and Off The Court” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I get book tips from social media and friends. I always like to learn new things, so sometimes I might read about basketball and it will inspire me about new leadership techniques. I have a constant hunger to learn, so I pick up a book.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received — your secret sauce?
Equality.

A mentor of mine once said that fairness is not just to treat everyone the exact same way. It’s important to look at each person as a unique individual and work with them on that basis.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, serial entrepreneur

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Gladys” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108eb2eb-8ba2″]

Gladys is an expert in mobile technology and data solutions. Since joining UberMedia in 2012 as CTO, she has been responsible for assembling a best-in-class data science team and pivoting UberMedia from a social media app developer to a leading mobile advertising technology company.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About UberMedia” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108eb2eb-8ba2″]


UberMedia provides the highest quality mobile data solutions trusted by businesses to creatively solve their persistent challenges. The company’s diverse suite of products process billions of social, demographic, and location signals daily for Fortune 500 companies across retail, automotive, and entertainment to better understand and influence modern consumers with the most accurate business decision science.

Recognized as a pioneer in targeted mobile advertising, UberMedia was listed as Fast Company’s “50 Most Innovative Companies,” The Wall Street Journal’s Top “50 Startups,” Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America,” and as one of Advertising Age’s “Best Places to Work.” UberMedia is headquartered in Pasadena, CA. For more information, visit www.ubermedia.com.

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

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

TechBytes with Patrick Renvoise, Chief NeuroMarketing Officer & Co-founder, SalesBrain

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
0
Patrick Renvoise
TechBytes with Patrick Renvoise, Chief NeuroMarketing Officer & Co-founder, SalesBrain

Patrick Renvoise
Chief NeuroMarketing Officer & Co-founder, SalesBrain

In the run up to Full Circle Insights’ Circulate 2017, we spoke to Patrick Renvoise, Co-Founder & Chief Neuromarketing Officer, Salesbrain, who is scheduled to speak on Neuromarketing and Neuroselling: The New Sciences of Persuasion, at the event. In this interview, Patrick gives us an introduction to the nascent field of neuromarketing.

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

MTS: Tell us about your role at SalesBrain and how you reached here?
 Dr Christophe Morin co-founded SalesBrain with me. I got there because I love science and because of 2 passions:

  • The marketing of complex solutions

With a MS in Computer Sciences, I marketed Silicon Graphic super computers for many years and developed a passion for the marketing of complicated solutions. I also had a chance to meet with many of the top scientists at the world’s greatest institutions like NASA, Shell, BMW, … and the best universities like Stanford , Harvard, EPFL, and the IITs .

  • The human brain

I can’t learn enough about the human brain. With 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, the brain represents one of the most complex systems in the universe. Realizing that all our decisions come from the electro-chemical reactions of our neuronal networks is just mind boggling …not to mention that in 2017 there is still no consensus about how consciousness arises from those 3 lbs of jelly like matter!

About 16 years ago, I had an epiphany. As I was reading a book on the human brain, the author, a neuroscientist by the name of Joseph Ledoux explained that the real decision maker in the brain is not the rational brain but the primal brain. Although the world of neuroscientists is well aware of this and they have strong research evidence to back it up, it seems this secret never reached the business world. So, I decided to write a book that would bridge the world of neuroscience with the world of business. It took me about 9 months of research and in the end, I was glad and possibly a bit surprised that a publisher was interested in publishing it. At the time the word neuromarketing didn’t even exist and our book (Dr Christophe Morin co-authored the book) was the very first book on the subject. We ended up selling more of that book than all the other books on neuromarketing combined. And just recently we signed up a new publishing agreement with Wiley so we are now working on a new book that will incorporate what we learned in the past 15 years. Christophe also received a PhD on the topic so we now have much stronger scientific evidence to support our model: NeuroMap™, the only model that reveals the working principles of the primal brain!

MTS: What is the foundational tenet of “Neuro-marketing”?
Let’s first define what marketing is: Traditional marketing is about asking people “What do you want?” then based on their answers marketers create a product (or service) and create a strategy to sell it. But the fundamental problem with this approach is that people don’t really know what they want. Self-reported measures of customers’ needs or wants are at best approximate, or at worst, completely irrelevant.

So the promise of neuromarketing is to draw a more accurate picture of what buyers really want. This is achieved by measuring neurophysiological changes that happen in their brain and nervous system when they answer the question “what do you want?” In essence, this is like looking behind the curtain of subconsciousness or poking into what is happening in the primal brain. These research techniques are called modalities and include:

  • Implicit Associations Test: whereby we measure the response time (in ms) to create associations between 2 concepts, thereby revealing unconscious biases. For example, this could be used by Apple to measure precisely (without the bias of having the interviewees telling us what they think) to what degree a person associates the brand Apple with the term “cool to own” as opposed to “easy to use”.
  • Layered Voice Analysis: We use software that extracts the emotional state of a subject from the frequency changes in their voice. This technology was originally developed for the CIA to interrogate terrorists. These involuntary changes in tone provide second by second information on a person’s emotional state during a dialogue or an interview.
  • Facial Coding: Uses a software to code the emotional state of the interviewee by measuring the contractions of 43 muscles on their face.
  • Biometrics: These methods include Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) which measures how electricity flows between 2 fingers and an Electrocardiogram (ECG), which monitors heart beats.
  • Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Eye tracking: With eye tracking, we measure where a subject’s eyes are focusing, either on a static image or on a video. This is typically paired with an EEG which measures the small electric currents on top of the skull. These currents are symptomatic of various forms of brain activity which translate into variables with a marketing meaning such as the level of attention of the interviewee, their level of engagement, and cognitive effort.
  • fMRI: The level of brain activity is revealed by measuring the amount of oxygen used by various areas of the brain.

All these modalities have a range of applications and limitations but the common trend is that those techniques which were once expensive, complicated and limited for lab testing are now becoming ubiquitous. The hardware and software necessary to run these tests are becoming more affordable, more portable and easier to use. So, we continue to see a progression in how neuromarketing complements traditional marketing and some people even believe that the natural evolution will be for neuromarketing to replace traditional marketing.

MTS: How does SalesBrain’s NeuroMap methodology scientifically diagnose pain points in customer engagement?
The promise of Neuromarketing is indeed to probe the minds of the consumers while removing the approximation of self-reported answers. In fact, we specifically look at unveiling their pains (as opposed to needs) because frustrations and fears are core drivers of our behavior, which function below our level of awareness. These negative emotions dictate our behavior including our buying patterns as predictably as the strings move the puppet.

What is central and unique to NeuroMap™ is that it provides a scientific explanation of how consumers will be affected by messages. It also provides a map of how to optimize these messages to improve their impact on the consumers. The key concepts of NeuroMap™ explain in simple yet scientific terms the predominance of the primal brain (vs the rational brain) in all buying decisions. So once our clients understand the working principles of the primal brain, all the research efforts including the complex decisions on the choice of stimuli to be tested and the interpretation of the data are driven by NeuroMap™.

MTS: Can neuromarketing technologies bridge the gap in content marketing, sales enablement, and sales productivity?
Using a neuromarketing model, because it provides a scientific model of persuasion, will improve the impact of all the messages created by the enterprise. Not only the marketing department but also the sales department (we also talk of neuro-selling) will be able to create messages that are designed to appeal to their audience. In fact, we start to hear the term: Neuro-ergonomic to describe sales and marketing activities and messages which will not fatigue the brain of the customers, giving these messages more chances to create a positive impact.

MTS: With growing proliferation of AI/ML technologies into marketing technologies, how do you foresee the landscape of neuromarketing evolving by 2020?
I believe neuromarketing will continue to evolve rapidly in the coming years. Just like any new technology it will follow the standard 5 state adoption curve—rejection, skepticism, over-optimism, realism, and adoption. At this stage, only the innovators have experienced neuromarketing and most people are still in the skepticism phase. It is only when marketers will have witnessed the unique insights that can be brought by neuromarketing that we will see a larger adoption. As with anything connected with the brain, the concepts are complex and the learning curve is steep. Marketers would have to learn a new language.

It took 40 to 50 years for marketing to mature so neuromarketing is still in its infancy. Now because the prices of the hardware and software necessary to run these experiments are coming down (a decent EEG helmet with 16 sensors now cost less than $10,000), because the processes to capture the data, and analyze and interpret the data are becoming easier and faster and because marketers now have access to a scientific model like NeuroMap to generate recommendations, and finally because more and more people are becoming proficient in these techniques, the progression of NeuroMarketing is inevitable.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Patrick.
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

MarTech Market Worth $34.3 Billion a Year; 50% Of Brands Don’t Have the Tools Yet!

By
Sudipto Ghosh
-
2
MarTech
MarTech Market Worth $34.3 Billion a Year; 50% Of Brands Don’t Have the Tools Yet!

Global leaders and innovators throng to Dmexco to understand the digital trends of 2017. Just ahead of the event, Moore Stephens has announced the launch of a research report into the US and UK MarTech industry. The research which covered 500 marketing agencies revealed that:

  • Brands are spending 16% of their marketing budget on marketing technology
  • The MarTech market could be worth more than $34 billion
  • Brands expect MarTech budgets to rise by 10% in next year
  • 50% of brands don’t have the tools they need

New research assessing the current and future state of the MarTech industry, has found that the MarTech market in the UK and the US is growing exponentially as demand for new MarTech tools continues to rise.

Marketing Technology News: OpenText Automates Invoicing for Rosneft Deutschland

MarTech is a Burgeoning Industry

The survey by Moore Stephens, the top ten global accountancy firm, and WARC, a global authority on advertising and media effectiveness, questioned more than 500 UK and North American brands and agencies and confirms a burgeoning MarTech industry.

Damian Ryan, Partner, Moore Stephens
Damian Ryan, Partner, Moore Stephens

Commenting on the findings, Damian Ryan, Partner, Moore Stephens, said, “We carried out this research to better understand the size of the market and the drivers behind its growth. It is only recently that MarTech has been given its own name, having previously been engulfed by the AdTech umbrella.”

Brands Pumping More Dollars into MarTech

The results show that on average, brands are spending 16% of their marketing budget on marketing technology. The research also reveals that the size of the MarTech industry for the combined UK and US markets is estimated at $34.3 billion.

Damian said, “While the rise of digital has been utterly spectacular, it has brought about widespread mistrust in the marketplace and channels that underline its success. We’ve seen the phenomenon that is fake news, as well as ad blocking and a general worrying absence of transparency.”

Marketing Technology News: Adobe Survey Says That Voice and Screen Combined Are the Future

85% Marketers Use At least One MarTech Tool for Email Marketing

Marketers are most likely to be using a MarTech tool for email, with 85% currently doing so. The majority also use social media and CRM tools, whereas experience optimisation and collaboration tools are currently used by around a third (37%). However, both of the latter are set for a significant rise. The survey reveals an additional quarter will invest in experience optimisation and collaboration tools in the next year.

Startling Revelation: Dissatisfaction and Lack of Maturity in Utilizing MarTech Tools

Investment demand is driven by dissatisfaction: half (50%) of those polled state they don’t have the tools they need.

When analyzing agency versus brand, six in ten (58%) agencies stated they don’t believe their clients have what they need and don’t fully utilize the MarTech tools they do have.

Some Businesses are actually Planning to Cut their MarTech Budget!

Many businesses are looking to increase the investment in marketing technology: nearly half (46%) of the UK businesses and more than one in three (38%) in the US are looking to increase their investment in the next 12 months.

Only 7% of the US businesses and 4% of UK firms are looking to decrease.

When considering what holds marketers back from implementing MarTech, a limited budget is unsurprisingly the biggest barrier, with 42% of respondents saying so. For marketing and communications agencies, 57% said that the main barrier to investment is a lack of understanding of the marketing technology available. This is compared to just a quarter (25%) of brands polled.

Damian added, “The growth of the market shouldn’t come as a surprise to brands, agencies or anyone in the media industry. We are entering a new chapter of business, one that will be governed by trust and economic common sense.”

Amy Rodgers
Amy Rodgers, Research Editor, WARC

Amy Rodgers, Research Editor, WARC, said, “The marketing technology market has grown at a phenomenal rate over the past few years as marketers are required to do more, at a faster pace, than ever before. Tools that can assist or automate parts of this job are in high demand, especially as the evidence for their return on investment grows. This research indicates that MarTech use in the UK and US is set to grow by 10% over the next year, a strong indication of the strength of a market that is continually consolidating and diversifying.”

It is clear from the report that the businesses seek greater authority and a sense of control—a key driver to invest in MarTech. While MarTech industry continues to grow at a blitzkrieg pace, future investments would be largely driven by product innovations relevant to the company’s maturity in adopting technologies for marketing, sales, and advertisement.

Marketing Technology News: Airbnb Introduces New Search Capabilities for Business Trips

Going Headless in the Age of the Internet of Things

By
Ben Haynes
-
1
IOT

Just as brands and publishers are getting used to the mobile era, we are beginning the post-mobile era. Some 10 million homes now have Amazon Echo, and Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all trying to become operating systems for the home. Meanwhile, General Electric, Samsung, and BMW are creating Internet of Things (IoT) devices for industry. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, there will be about 12.8 billion consumer-focused connected products in existence.

For publishers and marketers, this means that there will be an explosion of touch points. The content that they create will be destined for mobile and tablet devices, smart watches, fitness trackers, kitchen appliances, car dashboards, airport kiosks and all kinds of emerging IoT channels.

The problem is that today’s content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress were set up only to create and support simple blogs and websites–not a complex IoT network made up of billions of nodes. They are completely ill-equipped to handle the increasingly complex requirements to publish and syndicate IoT based content.

Going headless unshackles companies from the constraints of the traditional CMS and presents a more elegant solution. Here’s why more and more marketers and publishers are switching.

The Internet of Things Will Be a New Destination for Content

A decade ago, no one thought that people would be reading the news or magazines on their phone. Now no one thinks that people will be reading content on their refrigerator. It may take a few years, but soon devices in the home, car, and public places like retail establishments will be content distribution machines. Publishers and marketers will need a CMS that is “headless” in that it is not limited to managing a single website, but is instead built around a content API that allows it to publish anywhere.

Web-Based Content is Only Designed for the Web

It’s possible that you will run your content exclusively on the web for the next few years. But in a few years, you might want to be able to port all of it — including your legacy content — to apps as well. You can’t do that with a CMS that is designed for web-based content because it is not pure content: it’s loaded with HTML tags. Instead of having to make the change a few years from now, you can make it now and be ready for the change.

You Can Experiment More With Apps

Typically, editorial organizations with a lot of legacy content in a CMS like WordPress will port the content into a web view within the app. That means even though the app is ostensibly a totally different experience than the website, what you’re looking at in the app is basically a web page.

With a headless CMS, you can innovate more within the app. For instance, a New York-based fitness studio uses a headless CMS to manage its content in a platform-agnostic way. That means that everything ranging from its studio kiosks and native iOS app to its POS system are distributed via one CMS.

Data, Data, Data

A CMS usually keeps its content sequestered from a company’s other data. But to a headless CMS, data is data, so you can pool that data and content in one place—simplifying and combining your platforms.

That’s because, with a traditional CMS, everything is built around the website and content is stored as HTML. With a headless CMS, everything is built around data that’s created as pure, platform-agnostic content that can be used anywhere, ranging from syndicated articles to CRM or payroll. 

An Open-Source Headless CMS Can Be Used as Internal Productivity Tools

Companies that are spending hundreds of dollars a month on services like Basecamp can approximate the same thing by using an open-source headless CMS for project management. Some hotels for instance, use a headless CMS as a property management system to avoid proprietary licensing costs for software and to keep all the data in one place.

For these reasons and more, a headless CMS will increasingly become an obvious solution to content-driven companies focused on engaging consumers whenever and wherever they are. For a business that’s been around for longer, adopting a headless CMS may be a harder transition, but still a necessary one. The sooner one makes the change, the better. Unless you think that the IoT and mobile are fads, there’s no denying that going headless is the future.

TechBytes with Apu Kumar and Roger Holenweger, LotaData

By
Avinash Duduskar
-
0
Apurva-Kumar-_-Roger-Holenweger Lotadata
Apurva-Kumar-_-Roger-Holenweger Lotadata

(Left) Apu Kumar
Founder & CEO, LotaData

(Right) Roger Holenweger
Principal Engineer, LotaData

Getting to the Ground Truth about GeoMarketing. LotaData is a 2-year new company in San Francisco, California. They pioneered the field of “People Intelligence”. LotaData harnesses the power of AI to provide geo-analytics and deep insights for the connected mobile world. We got chatting with their Founder & CEO, Apu Kumar and their Principal Engineer, Roger Holenweger about the inner workings of location-based intelligence. Their technical chops and domain expertise were on full display as we got deeper into the subject matter.

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

MTS: How can brands and agencies get access to quality location data for geo-marketing?
Apu and Roger: Location data is becoming an increasingly important source of real-world context and geo-insights for the martech industry. There are many sources of mobile location signals. Listed below are some of the common sources of data, with merits and weaknesses.

– Mobile Apps or Publishers

Embedding SDKs or APIs in mobile apps can be a source of accurate GPS, Wifi and BLE beacon-based location signals. This method of sourcing location data necessitates a reasonably large portfolio of apps to create a statistically meaningful panel. In terms of data quality, mobile apps are the best source of data for inferring geo-behaviors at the individual and aggregate levels.

– Programmatic Networks

Ad exchanges, DSPs, and large programmatic networks can be a real-time source of GPS and Wifi location signals. Unfortunately, 25-30% of data derived through such sources tends to be imprecise or inaccurate and needs to be discarded. With machine intelligence, it is possible to sift through the noise and cleanse the data to yield meaningful geo-behaviors.

– Connected Automobiles

The proliferation of 2.5G and 3G connections in automobiles has made them a significant source of GPS location signal streams. The location signals tends to be aligned with roadways and freeways, making it the best data source to understand the transportation dynamics in cities and towns. New techniques in machine intelligence can unveil interesting patterns and geo-behaviors hidden in vehicular location data.

– Telco Network Operators

Telcos or mobile network operators have captive subscriber bases that can provide an endless source of location signals. The bulk of data collected through telcos tends to be from cell tower triangulation, a technique that results in coarse granularity. Lack of GPS level accuracy and precision from telcos reduces the efficacy of this location data source.

– Location Data Management Platforms

LDMPs are independent entities that collect, organize and archive the world’s location data. These are the most expansive and reliable source for location signals. Most LDMPs will cleanse, structure, analyze and verify the raw location signals as part of their standard service offering. Some LDMPs may also transform the raw location signals into actionable dwell times, accurate user profiles, geo-behaviors and packaged cohorts.

MTS: How does the industry ensure that location data is privacy compliant?
Apu and Roger: There is no substitute for full disclosure. Location data should be collected with adequate notice to and full permission from end users.

Mobile apps, publishers, programmatic networks, LDMPs should take the utmost care in how they source, manage and transmit location data. People must be made aware of any personally identifiable information (PII) that may be collected along with the location signals from their mobile devices.

The typical tuple of [ latitude, longitude, and timestamp ] is not considered as PII in most countries. In the EU however, that may change with the advancement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

MTS: Is there a role for machine learning and AI in the location intelligence industry?
Apu and Roger: The geo-marketing industry believes that location signals by their very nature represent the ground truth.

One often hears claims that location signals collected from mobile devices reveal the exact places visited by people, their affinity toward certain brands, where they shop, dine, party, work, or even live.

Statements like the above often spook people into imagining that big brother is tracking their every move in the most intrusive manner. The truth is far from it.

A high quality source of location signals might pick up a handful of locations each day from a person’s mobile device. This typically represents less than 10% of the actual geo-movement or foot falls of that person.

And that is where Machine Learning and AI come into play. There is the need for inferring and predicting a person’s geo-behaviors, likes and dislikes, intent and inclination, with access to a very limited set of location data.

LotaData has been at the bleeding edge of using machine learning for geo-marketing. GeoDash is the AI-powered location intelligence solution from LotaData. GeoDash is available to mobile developers, telcos, programmatic exchanges, and smart cities.

MTS: We often hear about panel-based insights. What exactly are panels?
Apu and Roger: A panel is a cohort of people that are willing to share data with a commercial entity. The large majority of location intelligence providers employ panels to collect data

Most panels are incentivized by the provider. In other words, the end user is compensated by the provider to share data about their mobile behaviors. By definition, this creates an inherent bias in behaviors.

The most sought-after panels are based on meaningful value-exchange resulting non-incentivized behaviors. End users share data with the mobile app in return for personalized and contextual content. In other words, end users share data about themselves in order to improve their in-app experience.

MTS: What is an adequate panel size or sample size to represent a city or region?
Apu and Roger: The typical population survey uses a panel or sample sizes of 1%. For San Francisco (population 8,500,00), that translates to 8500 people.

If that number were to be increased to 2% or 17000 people in San Francisco, one can expect to reach 98% confidence levels in the geo-behavioral observations, with 1% confidence interval.

To get to 99% confidence with 0.5% interval, one would need a panel size of 600,00 people or 7% of the population of San Francisco. Reducing the interval to 0.1% requires a 10x larger sample of 6,000,00 people or approximately 70% of the population.

LotaData recommends that the geo-marketing industry should set the bar at 7% of the population for statistically relevant panels. That said, we always strive for our panel inventory to exceed 10% of the population, to be able to infer meaningful geo-insights from location data.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Apu and Roger.
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

1...4,3324,3334,334...4,359Page 4,333 of 4,359

About Us

MarTech Series covers marketing technology news, editorial insights and digital marketing trends from around the globe. Updates on modern marketing tech adoption, martech interviews, tech articles and events.

Quick Links

Visit our Other Sites

Follow Us

Interested in our Customized Editorial Services? Please fill your details and we'll get in touch with you!

FILL YOUR DETAILS
Brought to you byiTechSeries LogoCopyright © 2026 MarTech Series. All Rights Reserved.Privacy Policy
To repurpose or use any of the content or material on this and our sister sites, explicit written permission needs to be sought.