Pessimistic Security, Embedded AI and GDPR to Reign Supreme in the Legal Sector in 2018
Roy Russell, CEO of Ascertus Limited, highlights the top three technology trends in the legal sector in 2018
The Shift From Optimistic to Pessimistic Security Will Gain Momentum
It is widely acknowledged that, be it intentionally or inadvertently, people are the weakest link for organizations when it comes to security. With law firms being an especially attractive target for cybercriminals, and vulnerable as their security measures are often found to be inadequate; clients will demand tangible, demonstrable and even evidenced action from legal services providers on how their data is protected.
Fresh on the heels of numerous recent embarrassing and potentially business-crippling data breaches, law firms will make a concerted shift from optimistic to pessimistic security.
In addition to traditional preventative security measures such as securing infrastructure, email security management, and intrusion detection; in 2018 firms will have no choice, but to segregate content, establish ethical walls and institute governance policies that allow access to information on a ‘need to know’ basis.
This will ensure that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive data – and in the event of credentials being compromised, the impact of the breach will be significantly limited to the account in question.
‘Me Too’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Products Will Become Prevalent and Software Vendors Will Rush to Embed AI Within Their Applications
Over the last year or so, many large law firms have dabbled with AI technology, with some building their own systems and others deploying separate tools for areas such as contract analysis, information retrieval, analyzing court rulings and more. These firms are now finding that it takes much more time and effort than they had originally anticipated creating these bespoke, from the ground up, AI solutions.
In 2018, AI will become more widespread as vendors of a whole raft of different software solutions, including document and email management, case/matter management and legal spend management will “AI enable” their offerings, making the technology’s adoption simple and par for the course.
End-users will not necessarily understand or need to know that AI is now ‘under the bonnet’, but they will come to expect their applications to be more automated, make proactive suggestions, provide practical guidance, and automatically complete routine processes for them.
With the GDPR Countdown Truly in Motion, Law Firms Will Adopt More Advanced Approaches to Data Security
The Panama Papers and other recent high profile cases have clearly highlighted the reputational damage a security breach can cause. Come 25 May 2018, when the new GDPR comes into force, the business impact of a data breach of the like of Appleby will be debilitating for a law firm. Going beyond standard security measures such as analyzing application logs, network traffic, endpoint device activity and files downloaded by systems users; firms will adopt more advanced approaches to data security such as behavioral modeling, machine learning, and forensics.
Leveraging historical and contextual information, such technologies will enable firms to evaluate individual behavior and automatically alert the organization based on deviations from normal activities. This kind of evidential activity will play a crucial role in enabling firms to demonstrate genuine intention to comply with the GDPR in the unfortunate event of a data breach.
Key Partners report Receptiv Platform Engagement Levels Double Google and Facebook and Viewability and Human Attention Scores Similar to Traditional TV viewership.
ReceptivTM, the leading mobile video advertising platform focused on delivering high performing video across mobile environments, announced a three part media guarantee that ensures all mobile video inventory is reliable, brand safe and — an industry-first — engaged. With an expected $147B to be spent on mobile in 2018, viewability, fraud, and safety remain chief concerns for marketers. But above all else, brands need to identify the mobile content environments their audience values most, from an ever-expanding universe of choices.
Receptiv’s Reliable, Safe, Engaged (RSE) guarantee is structured around the most critical performance indicators for a valuable mobile video campaign, and pledges make-good impressions for those that don’t meet the commitment criteria of at least 90% viewability score, less than 2% invalid traffic (IVT) or non-human traffic (NHT), and 100% brand safe for all managed service campaigns. Impressions are qualified through a series of proprietary measures and a network of best-in-breed partners, including MOAT, comScore, Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings, and TAG.
Receptiv’s RELIABLE, SAFE, ENGAGED (RSE) Media Guarantee:
Reliable Media is viewable, free of non-human traffic and reaches the right person.
Key partnerships include MOAT, IAS, TAG and Nielsen DAR
All mobile web impressions include ads.txt to guarantee direct to publisher relationships
Campaign Guarantees
90% viewability for rewarded media/80% for non-rewarded media
Less than 2% IVT/NHT
Receptiv MOAT Benchmarks:
Safe Media is served in environments that exclude violent, lewd or other objectionable content. Receptiv is committed to providing 100% safe environments, free of any vulgar behavior or content that could diminish brand value or the user experience such as obscene language, pornographic content and vulgar user generated content.
To ensure a completely brand-safe environment, Publishers must complete a three step process for inclusion in the Receptiv network:
Complete both Apple and Google App Store vetting process and approval
Complete Receptiv evaluation process to assess content, maintenance and engagement for overall health of environment
Successfully test and integrate with Receptiv’s software developer kit (SDK)
Include ads.txt file in compliance with IAB Tech Labs to eliminate counterfeit mobile web inventory
Engaged Media is any impression targeted to mobile environments that earn top tier engagement rates that are proven to positively impact a mobile video campaign’s performance. Receptiv’s curated publisher portfolio features environments and content that demonstrate a clear value to their audience, reflected in the time they spend in-app, and the number of times they come back throughout the day or week. Receptiv’s in-app network frequency and session duration earns brands 286% higher favorability and engagement rates per Vizu studies. Receptiv platform boasts upto double the engagement times spent than the most popular mobile platforms: Google, Facebook, YouTube and SnapChat per comScore.
Key partnerships include: comScore, AppAnnie
Campaign Guarantees
100% of media fall within comScore’s top 20 content app categories
Vizu Brand Lift: <20%
Ari Brandt
“With ad fraud on pace to become a $50M problem in the next 10 years, and declining viewability scores, brands are demanding that their ad dollars are being spent on impressions that you can see; and that those impressions are being viewed by a human in a positive environment that doesn’t contradict the message,” said Ari Brandt, CEO of Receptiv. “Our rigorous evaluation process and partners like ComScore combine for a network made entirely of reliable, safe inventory that meets the audience where and when they’re most engaged, so the real value of this guarantee is in the confidence and security we can offer agencies and the brands they represent.”
The advertising market is a completely unique mix of technologies, human factors and innovations, all merging for a single purpose of creating enough quality content to sell of a certain service or product to the correct target audience. Therein lies the challenge as finding that audience is at times a monumental undertaking that even the most advanced systems cannot solve efficiently.
Lost revenues and budget waste have long become a common phenomenon on the AdTech market, leading to a stagnation spurred in turn by obsolete technological solutions and an ossified mentality of marketing specialists, unwilling to adopt new approaches. The trend started changing in early 2016 when the advent of a massive number of ICO(Initial Coin Offering) projects based on blockchain technology swept across the globe, creating, in essence, a completely new industry.
The marketing and AdTech industries have not been left unnoticed by the new technological upheaval as multiple projects have begun offering solutions to various issues plaguing the market. The capabilities of blockchain technology have granted the opportunity of solving some market issues and the industry is showing positive growth.
ICO Industry
According to ICOWatchList, the US stands for about 20 percent of all ICOs, the UK is at 11 percent, and Russia trails at 10 percent. The AdTech market has also been largely segmented with the US leading with 39 percentof ICOs in the sector, Russia with 13 percent, and the remaining market participants at less than 5 percent. As can be deduced, there is a noticeable advantage of AdTech projects being developed in the US.
Dmitry Malyanov
“Many in the ICO industry are fighting an ongoing battle with the competitive profitability factor of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The average income of AdTech versus the yield of Bitcoin is considerably higher. Such growth was achieved thanks to projects like Snovio, AdEx and Viuly. As is evident, AdTech projects on average grow far faster than Bitcoin, thus producing greater profitability yields,” explained Dmitry Malyanov, Co-Founder of AdHive.
Prior to Q4 of 2017, the AdTech sector was fairly modest. The real boom came in the last quarter of the year. October saw the emergence of the same number of ICOs as in the previous nine months taken together. In general, ICO AdTech projects have proven to be quite successful.
Market Trends
The trend is predicted to continue in the coming year as the market is experiencing growing demand for products based on blockchain technology and the AdTech market is one of the segments leading the way. An impressive 19 projects have already announced their ICOs in Q1 of 2018 (against 16 projects in Q4 of 2017). The offerings of these startups have attracted the attention of multiple parties and their prospects seem to be quite promising as the ideas backing their products are demanded on the market. The average amount of funds raised on ICOs is about $15 million, the median being $5.5 million. This is higher than the average for all ICOs together taken in other sectors of the industry, proving that AdTech is one of the most actively growing sectors.
The most popular ones on the AdTech market are blockchain-based projects, which position themselves as marketplaces for advertising. These are pseudo exchanges, such as AdEx, or others like sponsored content sales platforms. They offer the sale of advertising through banners, contracts or bloggers. Just as popular are browsers that collect data for more effective marketing and have built-in functions for consumer interaction, as well as projects for marketing in virtual reality and video advertising.
Zapp360 has named Rosie O’Meara as Chief Executive Officer, elevating her from her previous role as COO. Zapp360, the leading force in local mobile advertising solutions, continues to expand its industry leading SaaS Platform.
Rosie O’Meara, CEO
Mrs. O’Meara is a digital media visionary, guiding advertisers and publishers to adopt and implement new technologies to drive more revenue from local markets. Having started her career at ITN Digital and Verve Mobile, she joined Zapp360 in 2013, leading their business development initiative. She has been instrumental in growing the AdMessenger platform since its origin through its reseller partnerships. Her leadership during Zapp360’s evolution and growth makes her uniquely qualified to assume this vital role.
“Zapp360 is working everyday to make local advertising more effective and powerful for all involved,” said O’Meara. “It’s that mission that I am committed to and passionate about. I am fortunate to be part of the Zapp360 organization that has such a profound impact on the local advertising space.”
Nicole Benvenuti, CFO
An additional appointment is Nicole Benvenuti as Zapp360’s Chief Financial Officer, elevated from her previous role as Controller. Ms. Benvenuti joined in early 2017 and has contributed greatly to the financial and organizational structure of the company during a period of rapid growth. Together they will now lead Zapp360’s strategic and operational mission.
“As co-founders, Jamie Estrin and I are pleased to have the opportunity to work with such competent talent within our growing organization,” said Jerome FitzGibbons. He adds, “Now is the time, within our company and our industry, to acknowledge and promote leaders that demonstrate the knowledge, tireless work, and commitment to grow Zapp360 to the next level. We look forward to continued success under this leadership.”
Enterprise Software Platform Empowers Brands to Collaborate with Their Key Advocates to Create and Share Authentic Brand Stories
Greenfly, a software platform that enables brands to engage with their valued advocates to create and deploy powerful digital content, announced that it has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding. This round brings Greenfly’s total funding to date to $14.7 million. The financing round was led by Alpha Edison with participation from earlier investors Iconica Partners, Elysian Park, and Corazon Capital.
As social media becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, companies are finding it critical to create timely content that maintains an authentic voice. Co-founded by Shawn Green, former LA Dodgers All-Star, and Daniel Kirschner, Greenfly’s approach enables brands to activate and orchestrate networks of high-value content creators (brand advocates, influencers and employees) in one place, creating an efficient request, create, review, approve and post process.
Daniel Kirschner
“Alpha Edison joining the Greenfly team further validates the importance of what we have built and the enormous market demand for the Greenfly technology to simplify the digital content creation and distribution process,” said Daniel Kirschner, co-founder and chief executive officer, Greenfly, Inc. “While there are other companies attempting to attack segments of this, Greenfly is the first company to create a platform that manages the entire content orchestration process at scale.”
Through the Greenfly platform, a consumer brand can collaborate with a network of endorsers, staff, even passionate customers to create and simultaneously share thematically unified content announcing a new product across hundreds of individual social accounts and various social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The new funding will enable the company to continue building out its technology, drive user acquisition and other marketing initiatives, and bolster the team with new hires.
Nate Redmond
“Finding a streamlined approach for brands to engage their networks in an authentic way is increasingly important, but difficult to execute,” said Nate Redmond, managing partner, Alpha Edison. “We have been impressed with Greenfly’s platform, unique value proposition, and the customer success they’ve had. We are looking forward to continued momentum as more companies experience Greenfly firsthand.”
Since 2014, Greenfly has become the platform of choice for many of the world’s leading brands, sports leagues, teams, and media companies to leverage their networks of influencers, brand ambassadors, and staff for the production and distribution of video and other media content. Content generated or distributed through Greenfly has entertained millions on television, social media platforms, and across the Internet.
Kochava Releases New Fraud Prevention Tools, Expanding Robust Anti-Fraud Toolset
Mobile’s rapid growth as a premier advertising platform has made it a hotbed for fraud, a costly part of ad campaigns. Kochava, the industry leader providing holistic measurement solutions for connected devices, announced Checksum (a new feature that will validate installs and payloads ahead of attribution) and three new views to the Fraud Console suite of mobile ad fraud visualizations, enhancing their robust anti-fraud toolset.
Grant Simmons
“We’ve been identifying data abnormalities deemed potentially fraudulent for the past three years. During this time, we’ve been developing tools to identify fraud based on patterns,” said Grant Simmons, Director of Client Analytics at Kochava. “From what we’re seeing now, 84% of fraudulent clicks come from the 10 highest volume networks; and approximately 27% of installs on these networks have been flagged as fraudulent.”
Faked installs manufactured by bots attempt to mimic human behavior. Without investigation, affected campaign data may appear normal. Because they’re automated, Kochava algorithms from the Fraud Console can look for and identify patterns and flag suspicious activity for review. Without ad fraud detection tools, there is no effective way to combat fraud.
“Marketers are accustomed to looking for install or conversion rates. They’re not used to questioning what they see. While those rates may initially look normal, there’s a good chance that at least a portion of the installs or conversions are fraudulent,” Simmons said.
Kochava has developed a number of tools to automate ad fraud detection and prevention in the past year. For prevention, Checksum, enabled through the Kochava SDK (Android 3.2.0, iOS 3.3.0, Windows 3.0.1 versions or greater) orserver-to-server integration, validates install receipts received by comparing them with identifiers associated with the receipts.
“With Checksum, installs that don’t match are dropped before attribution happens, preventing spoofed installs from infiltrating campaigns,” Simmons said.
Customers have two options on how Checksum filters unverifiable installs:
Strict: drops all unverifiable installs regardless of SDK version
Lenient: drops installs that did not pass for valid SDK versions
For mobile ad fraud detection, the Fraud Console, released in 2017, is a set of 13 data visualizations generated by the anti-fraud algorithms. These custom algorithms detect anomalies that potentially involve illegitimate attribution and installs that fall outside the normal threshold of behavior. The newest visualizations include Click Flooding, Time-to-Install (TTI) Outliers and TTI Distribution.
Click flooding is one of the more prevalent forms of fraud. Networks or sub-publishers flood their channels with clicks to steal attribution of legitimate installs. The Click Flooding visualization in Fraud Console flags these channels for review by marketers.
The second visualization is called TTI Outliers. TTI, or Time-to-Install, is a metric that records the time between a click and an install. It considers physical factors, such as network speed, along with behavioral factors, such as incentivization. The TTI Outliers visualization flags networks/sub-publishers that fall out of the normal range.
Similarly, the new TTI Distribution visualization shows networks/sub-publishers that have had an increased number of installs outside of the normal range for a marketer’s apps. Any visualization, if deemed fraudulent, can be used by marketers as evidence for make-good requests with that network.
Marketers should make monitoring of the Fraud Console visualizations part of their routine marketing analyses for 2018. Kochava Traffic Verifier and the Global Fraud Blacklist already provide clients with real-time fraud prevention. Now Checksum adds to the robust prevention strategies developed by Kochava to protect your campaigns from fraud.
The use of the Kochava Fraud Console for visualizations of abnormal activity allows marketers to stop any behavior that they may deem fraudulent in real time. In addition to using the visualizations for make-goods, they can export flagged device IDs and network/sub-publisher IDs to add to their own Fraud Blacklists.
Simmons added, “Because the mobile ecosystem is unregulated, everyone in the industry must use the resources available to mitigate fraud and report within the ecosystem those entities they identify as fraudulent.”
OpenText Defines the Future of Digital to Thousands of Industry Leaders From Tokyo to London
OpenText™, the global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), announced its 2018 Innovation Tour conference series. This global series of events will be held in nine cities around the world from February to May 2018. OpenText executives, including Mark J. Barrenechea, Vice Chairman, CEO and CTO; and Muhi Majzoub, EVP Engineering, will keynote at the events taking place in Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Johannesburg and London.
Mark J. Barrenechea
“The world is changing at an incredible pace, and the opportunities for businesses to grow, differentiate, and compete through digital technology have never been more dramatic than today,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, Vice Chairman, CEO and CTO, OpenText. “At OpenText, we are helping our customers drive strategic transformation by harnessing the power of their information through extreme automation and insight. By combining enterprise information with applications, security, the Business Network, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, we are defining the future of digital.”
Attendees at all Innovation Tour events will experience first-hand OpenText Magellan, a flexible AI and analytics platform designed to enable business insight. Attendees will also see how recently acquired technology from DellEMC, HP, Guidance Software, and Covisint is being integrated with the latest developments in OpenText’s next-generation digital platform, Release 16.
Barrenechea continued, “OpenText is The Information Company, and we are empowering our customers to do more with their enterprise information, turning data into insight, and insight into business success. As more enterprise critical information is being created by both humans and machines, organizations require new tools and new approaches to turn that data into insight. OpenText’s Innovation Tour presents an unmissable opportunity for customers to connect directly with product and solution experts and OpenText Executives to see the latest product innovation in action and to share their digital ambitions with OpenText and our partners.”
Company joins industry leaders to share insights on ethics as an integral component of any AI business strategy
Lionbridge Technologies, Inc., the world’s most trusted translation and digital communications company, today announced its participation in the AI Assistant Summit, an event that will explore advances and emerging trends in AI-powered digital assistants, being held at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco from January 25-26. The event brings together the world’s leading innovators in predictive intelligence, voice recognition and data mining who will reveal insights and strategies for organizations to leverage AI assistants in their business.
Jane Nemcova
Jane Nemcova, Vice President and General Manager of Global Services for Machine Intelligence at Lionbridge, will participate in a panel discussion, “As Our AI Systems Become More Capable, Should Ethics be an Integral Component to your Business Strategy?,” alongside executives from District 3, McGill University, Sensely and Ethical Resolve. The panel discussion will include a comprehensive debate on how to integrate ethics when developing a corporate AI strategy.
WHO:
Jane Nemcova, Vice President and General Manager, Global Services for Machine Intelligence, Lionbridge
WHAT:
Panel: As Our AI Systems Become More Capable, Should Ethics be an Integral Component to your Business Strategy?
WHERE:
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111
WHEN:
Friday, January 26, 2018
1:35– 2:15 p.m. PST
“We are excited to participate in this important dialogue and share our unique perspective on the critical importance of ethics in any AI business strategy,” said Nemcova. “Lionbridge is committed to helping organizations drive global growth and improve customer experiences through technology, and we look forward a lively discussion with industry experts on the role of ethics in AI and digital assistants.”
Lionbridge provides a global network of specialists who help clients test, optimize and roll out products and services in all languages and markets in which they compete. Lionbridge has an unparalleled track record of delivering large complex programs for the world’s leading brands and companies.
Building On 2017 Program Growth, HubSpot Launches New Integrations Directory With More Than 120 Available Apps
HubSpot, a leading CRM, marketing, sales, and customer experience platform, announced the continued growth of its app ecosystem and an ongoing investment in its platform with the launch of a redesigned integrations directory. The company doubled the number of certified apps available through the Connect Partner program in 2017 and as a result, saw total integration installs grow by 142%.
Today, there are more than 5,000 marketing and sales technology vendors globally, all striving to help businesses to better find and delight customers in a digital world. Navigating this large field can be a challenge for sales and marketing professionals, especially since many of these options can provide similar or complementary solutions to their existing software suite.
An integration platform empowers a SaaS company to bring these apps together, creating a connected experience for its customers by increasing their day-to-day efficiencies, their core software usage, and the overall success of their business.
“As businesses seek to orchestrate multiple cloud services in their marketing and sales stacks, we believe that a platform like HubSpot can deliver significant benefits by providing a central data model, a central workflow and user experience, and a central certification authority,” said Scott Brinker, HubSpot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem. “We believe the growth in HubSpot’s ecosystem over the past 12 months is a testament to the value of such a platform approach, and we look forward to further momentum with our Connect partners in the year ahead.”
The new integrations directory organizes and provides in-depth descriptions of the HubSpot Connect program’s more than 120 certified apps, making it easier than ever for businesses to find, discover, and install these solutions to help them grow. Customers and non-HubSpot users alike can easily explore the directory using its search functionality, browse specific category pages to uncover new use cases, and learn more about each integration and how it complements HubSpot’s core software stack.
“Our primary goal with the new directory is to help our users and customers find the right integration to help them achieve their business goals,” said Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot. “The challenges that we’re trying to solve for are quality, simplification, and education. Through the HubSpot Connect Program’s certification process of vetted integrations and the new directory’s functionality, we’re confident that we’re showcasing and educating our customers on the very best options available.”
Apparently, humans now only concentrate for around eight seconds. For anyone who works in mobile marketing, this probably won’t come as a surprise: keeping users engaged and making sure your messages aren’t simply swiped away is a full-time job. So it’s worth noting that the secret to increasing customer interaction with your messaging might not be written in the words you’re sending out.
Studies have shown that our brains process images thousands of times faster than words, which in those key eight seconds of concentration can make the difference between users dismissing a message and clicking through with intent to act. By optimizing the non-verbal aspects of your interactions, engagement and retention can be significantly increased, making a clear difference to your ROI.
Think of the last time you opened up a new app. Chances are, you’ll be remembering the layout, colors, images, videos, and icons, rather than listing all the greetings, promises and requests you were faced with. You wouldn’t be alone: 91% of buyers prefer interactive and visual content over text-based and static media. These visual cues subtly point us towards certain actions, building a more streamlined user experience.
In addition, designing your app and notifications to suit both your brand and your target audience can develop a sense of who you are and what you do faster and more cohesively than a lengthy paragraph. Using rich push notifications means that you can extend this ‘visual grammar’ to all aspects of your communications, even when the user isn’t in your app.
Keep the following elements in mind for your next interactions, and you’ll avoid losing users before they’ve even read a word.
A/B Testing Images
The phrase ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ may not be novel, but it’s certainly true that if you’re looking to convey the maximum information in the minimum time, images can get the job done. The screens below show two great examples of this. Both are rich push notifications triggered by a geofence set up by the app, but the images they use engage the user in different ways.
For companies that sell something which appeals to people visually, like clothes or food, using an enticing photo could help them spot something they might like.
For services or products that are more useful than beautiful, a simple map showing just how close users are will remind them of the practicality.
However, although general principles like these are useful for gauging the right type of image, they’re no substitute for cold, hard analytics. Conducting A/B testing with variations on the images allows you to try out two (or three, or four) across your user base, seeing which triggers the highest response rate and nuancing your visual marketing to maximize results.
Screen rich push, via Swrve
Rethink your calls to action
Push notifications, in-app messages, and tip overlays tread a fine line between being great marketing tools and being a nuisance to busy mobile users. Rather than trying to squeeze as much information and as many offers as possible into your character count, stick to one clear call to action that users notice straight away.
Deep linking your call to action to exactly where users need to be in the app minimizes the chances that you’ll lose them halfway to conversion. The text of your interactions could be worthy of a Pulitzer prize, but if your call to action dumps them at a home page, they’re not going to bother clicking around to complete the action.
If what you’re asking users to do needs more than a few more words, it’s time for a different approach. Videos are a powerful tool, and they’re ideal for saying what you need to without trying to crush it into a word count.
Videos have an even higher engagement rate than images, and once you’ve started watching, it’s hard to stop before the end. Rather than seeming like a sales message, a cleverly done video becomes an engaging piece of content.
If something looks ‘off’ about the messages being sent out, users are less likely to pay attention to them. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all template for every mobile everywhere, smart systems (Swrve included, obviously) will resize images automatically, so that you don’t have to keep cropping and uploading. We also use a ‘safe zone’, which shows the portion of the uploaded image that will be displayed regardless of the model being used, so you can be sure that your buttons and calls to action won’t be cropped or stretched. Simple – and it ensures great work from your design team isn’t defeated in its first encounter with the real world.
Similarly, there are no one-size-fits-all-locations. Various cultures and markets respond to different visual prompts, and the same image can hold different cultural currency around the world. Localizing your messages to fit key markets takes a small investment in time but can improve click-through by up to 150%.
Premium Publishers Report Yield, Monetization, and Management Benefits from Video Header Bidding
AppNexus, the world’s leading independent advertising technology company, announced client success with Prebid Video, built on Prebid.js, the industry’s most widely adopted open source header bidding technology. Premium publishers, including Ranker, FANDOM, and Diply, reported increased share of revenue through video header bidding, including eCPMs up to 100% higher than tag-based integrations; ease of integration and extensibility; advantages of customization; and optimized national and international yield.
“Prebid Video unlocks valuable video supply and raises the quality of the video marketplace, transforming video header bidding from early adopter status to a mainstream monetization strategy. We have seen more than one billion video header bidding requests monthly, and eCPMs are often well above average prices in video exchanges,” said Eric Hoffert, SVP, Video Technology, AppNexus.
Prebid Video is the latest technology built on Prebid.js. It enables publishers to monetize instream and outstream video inventory with customization and control across desktop and mobile, offering revenue optimization via premium demand partners, while reducing latency.
As with Prebid for display advertising, Prebid Video has proven a powerful monetization tool for publishers. Ranker, a Quantcast Top 30 site with 70+ million monthly unique visitors, integrated Prebid Video in the spring of 2017. Since that time, Ranker has observed a significant rise in revenue from video header bidding for instream and outstream.
“At Ranker, we have seen video header bidding eCPMs twice those of our tag-based partners, a significant increase reflecting the premium nature of our supply,” said Premesh Purayil, Chief Technology Officer, Ranker. “Our Q4 2017 revenue showed an even split between video header bidding and direct deals, with the former emerging as the principal driver of advertising revenue. Initially testing with over 50 tag-based video partners, we have already narrowed that down to 15 partners, streamlining our operations and improving efficiency.”
As well as a powerful monetization solution, Prebid Video is easy to integrate and set up. FANDOM, a leading entertainment media brand with 180 million monthly uniques (Quantcast), went live with outstream using Prebid Video in June 2017, with plans to explore instream expansion in 2018.
“Prebid Video has allowed us to extend easily from display to video header bidding, a crucial capability for omni-channel publishers,” said Lincoln Gunn, Director of Revenue Partnerships, FANDOM. “We have also been able to tap into international video demand and use multiple demand partners. These factors have enabled us to activate outstream revenue and move away from tag-based partnerships, leading to increased competition.”
Diply, a comScore top 10 Lifestyles website and the 66th largest domain in the U.S. with 42 million monthly unique visitors, built customized code within Prebid Video to facilitate competition between outstream video and banner units.
“Prebid Video enabled us to rapidly build a customized solution that uniquely supports our monetization strategy, producing strong returns for our outstream video offering,” said Sheri Ham, Vice President of Programmatic, Diply. “In a short period of time, we were able to achieve more than a million video header bidding impressions transacted daily.”
Prebid Video is available through prebid.org and supports all major video players, including video.js, JW Player, Brightcove, Kaltura, and Ooyala.
AI Primer: How Smart Technology Makes Businesses Better
Smart Technology Are Part of AI Landscape That Runs on Purpose-Built Software to Manage Data Effectively and with Accuracy
By 2018, 62% of companies all over the world will be using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve yield and operations of their business. However, less than half of businesses currently understand exactly how AI can directly benefit them.
As it happens, many of you are already using AI, though you may not realize it. Whether you are using Facebook to manage your business’ social media page, or Sage’s chatbot, Pegg, to track your accounts and finances, AI is closer than you think.
What is AI?
AI isn’t as intelligent as the name suggests¹. “Smart technology” actually refers to purpose-built software that is capable of making sense of huge quantities of data very quickly.
It needs instructions, it needs integration, and it needs specific criteria to organize information, but once it has those, it can reduce a job that might take an employee hours or days to mere minutes.
We know you don’t like having to trawl through hundreds of CVs in an effort to find the right candidate for your open position. Nobody does. Now, with the rise of social media websites, there are more places than ever to find that person with the ideal skill-set.
Have you ever visited a website and used the 24/7 chat support only to realize you are speaking with a computer? These are chatbots.
Chatbots are a great way to reduce the time your actual employees spend directly interacting with customers. Instead, the AI handles first-line support by identifying keywords in the customers’ questions and searching a database of responses to provide a suitable answer.
Smart Technology to Learn What Your Customers Really Want
For those of you using Facebook to advertise and promote your business, you may already be aware of its free AI software, Insights. This “clever” algorithm tracks activity on your page and posts, including how many people are sharing it and who is engaging with your page.
Insights allow businesses to quickly get a sense of which demographics are interested their products and services. This data can then be used to better target advertising and marketing to improve sales and services.
Multinational and finance companies deal with more data than anyone, and they use similar algorithms and smart software to analyze multiple thousands of data streams in a matter of seconds, spitting out easy-to-read graphs and even “suggestions” for optimized business strategies.
AI Smart Technology for Physical Hardware
It can be tempting to think that AI can only make sense of electronic data; it is software, after all. However, as companies using physical machinery take steps to safeguard their investments with sensors and detectors, smart technologies can now be used to integrate and manipulate this data, too.
Integrated AI is now capable of automating maintenance schedules for individual machine parts, making real-time risk assessments, and even stopping individual machines to avoid workplace accidents.
Businesses don’t need to worry about AI taking over control of their operations – not yet, anyway. Instead, you only need to think about what data would make your tasks easier, and how to integrate the technology with existing infrastructure. Afterwards, the AI will take care of the task assigned, leaving you to get on with more interesting opportunities.
With the Addition of Instagram Owned Measurement, Nielsen Now Offers Insights Across Three of the Biggest Social Media Publishers
Nielsen announced that it has added Instagram owned measurement into its Social Content Ratings® (SCR) platform. This launch marks the first time that Instagram will be measured and delivered by Nielsen’s syndicated social TV measurement solution. With the recent additions of Instagram and Facebook metrics, Nielsen’s SCR platform now offers insights across three of the biggest social media platforms—including Twitter—making it the most comprehensive measure of program-related conversation in the industry.
Since launching in 2016, SCR has become the only social measurement solution that measures both organic and owned social TV activity. Specifically, SCR offers insight into the engagement driven by owned accounts, those officially associated with the program, as well as organic activity that occurs between friends and fans. By measuring these two types of activities, media owners, agencies and advertisers will now have a total view of cross-publisher activity surrounding television programs, allowing them to maximize the impact of social strategies.
“Every day, people come to Instagram to connect with and about their favorite TV shows and stars. We’re excited that Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings will now reflect the ongoing conversation about TV happening on the platform,” said Katie Faul, Director, Partnerships at Instagram.
“Networks are continuing to invest in social strategies to drive awareness and engagement around programs,” said Erika Faust, SVP Client Service, Nielsen Social. “Being able to provide both owned and organic analysis now gives clients and the industry a trusted source of syndicated measurement to understand the return on those investments and how they play a role in driving the overall social conversation about television.”
“Having insight into how fans are interacting and engaging organically with our networks’ unique programming and how our talent and program accounts are helping drive that engagement is critical to our overall social strategy. With the addition of Instagram into Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings, we will now have an even deeper understanding of the share of voice our owned accounts have over three major social media platforms, allowing us to tailor our social media strategies by publisher,” said Jess D. Aguirre Jr., SVP Media Research & Consumer Insights, Crown Media.
Nielsen uses a dynamic methodology to track TV conversations around the clock, including leveraging Gracenote TV Listings data as a way to comprehensively measure social conversation specific to the linear TV experience at scale. In addition to the organic audience activity, this now includes measuring the engagement with official talent accounts as well as network and program accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By offering the industry unprecedented insight into the additional engagement driven by these talent individuals, clients can gauge the impact of their owned properties and how it contributes to general consumer activity about TV.
In addition to integrating Instagram owned to the platform, Facebook owned metrics were integrated into Social Content Ratings® user interface in November as a part of Nielsen Social’s commitment to providing comparable measurement across social platforms.
The Instagram owned data launch is available in Australia, Italy, Mexico and the US.
As we jump into 2018, we wanted to take a look back at 2017 with you. We’ve made new friends, engineered new functionality, hosted events, and even won awards for our software and company culture. We’re so grateful for all the hard work and collaboration our teams and customers put into 2017 to make it the success it was.
Customers shared their success stories
We have to start off by thanking you, our incredible community of 3,000 admins and hundreds of thousands of users across 600 customers for your loyalty, evidenced by increased customer satisfaction rates and participation in the Widen community.
You shared their success at events and on the web. Progressive Insurance, Trunk Club, and Cornell University spoke at the Henry Stewart Chicago digital asset management conference. (Some of their highlights and videos are available on the blog.) The University of San Francisco shared how they reduced brand asset request fulfillment from two weeks to on-demand. And with Widen Workflow, Spectrum Brands found new collaboration with their legal team.
Here’s a look at use of the Widen Collective across all of our customers by the numbers.
25 million assets managed in the Assets app
20 million embed views per day powered by Assets
2,500 deliverables created through Workflow
4,000 portals curated and shared
900 templates customized
One million API calls per day
Widen events generated new ideas
You brought energy and new ideas to the Widen Summit and Widen Workshops.
With over 200 DAM professionals in attendance at this year’s #WidenSummit, we hosted the first Best DAM Contest. Five customers shared how they are advancing DAM at their organization, then attendees voted to influence our judge’s panel. Jane Leuchter, Content Librarian at The Institute for Functional Medicine, won this year’s contest with her impressive organizational strategies for multiple points of access and user engagement tactics. Congrats, Jane! This year’s Widen Summit also offered trailblazing lessons on DAM adventures, advice, and creative solutions.
We hosted Workshops in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Madison. Workshops offered a way for local DAMsters to come together, share best practices, and see what others are doing with the Collective.
The UX team focused on simplifying and unifying the Collective user experience across Assets, Insights, Portals, Templates, and Workflow. The Product team encouraged customer feedback with customer-facing Trello roadmaps, user testing, and on-site research. The Development team implemented feature and functionality enhancements to deliver a best-in-class product experience.
Some highlights on updates to the Collective.
Assets: Assets now offers 360-degree video support, pinpoint asset cropping, and integrations with AI technologies to support auto-tagging.
Workflow: Enhancements to the proof annotator and automated workflow email reminders help your teams to stay on track.
Templates: Take one InDesign file and lock down all content that cannot be modified.
Portals: Create a microsite for your content with Portals navigation, CTAs, and branding.
We opened an office in London, U.K. in 2017, and have a team there to support customers and buyers in Europe. Here’s a look at some of our team members from the U.K. and Madison offices and our remote team doing holiday cheers.
We’ve added new talent to our Customer Experience Management, Professional Services, Onboarding Coach, Central Support, User Experience, and Advisor teams.
Our Training team offers Widen Essentials courses for accelerated onboarding and admin training for critical concepts. Our onboarding coaches refined the 12-step onboarding program proven to create ready-to-go DAM success agents. The expanded Professional Services team offers full-service implementation, managed services, data migration, and site refresh services, advancing our caretaker philosophy and do-it-for-me approach.
Our Widen Community Cares team lead us in donations and volunteer opportunities. We volunteered at Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin, supported Community Support Network with donations from our monthly drink cart, and provided gifts to a family through the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Dane County adopt-a-family program, just to name a few.
We won awards
We were honored with awards for our product and company culture, including awards from. EContent and Comparably, which put us on the same lists as companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Salesforce. Check out a few honors we’ve received:
WorldBlu certified (three years running)
One of Madison Magazine’s 2017 Best Places to Work (three years running)
Comparably’s Top 50 Best Places to Work
Comparably’s Best CEOs of 2017
Comparably’s Best Team Cultures of 2017
CODiE Award for Best Digital Asset Management Solution
The Top 100 Companies in the Digital Content Industry
Codified DAM Consultant’s Vendor of the Year
We’re thrilled to build on the successes of 2017 and to tackle new challenges and opportunities, and we look forward to working with you in 2018!
This Update Will Provide Website Owners and Marketers Alike With Deeper Insights Into The Types Of Companies That Are Visiting Their Website.
The popular add-on to Google Analytics, designed by Fastbase, Inc., has just rolled out a major update allowing users to segment their website leads by industry. This update will provide website owners and marketers alike with deeper insights into the types of companies that are visiting their website. The new feature is especially important as CMOs discover the impact that lead segmentation and marketing automation have on bringing in revenue.
Fastbase, Inc.’s marketing automation and lead segmentation tool helps target the right audience at the right time with the most powerful messaging. With nearly 70% of businesses using a marketing automation platform (MAP), like Fastbase, Inc.’s Web Leads, and with 69% of the top performers in B2B using marketing automation for customer acquisition, it’s evident that these strategies work, and very well. In addition to industry, the Google Analytics add-on designed by Fastbase, Inc. also provides even more insights into a website’s leads, including information on the lead’s company address, phone number, website, employee contact details, and the web pages that are being viewed. With Fastbase, Inc.’s digital marketing tools, CMOs will be able to automate inbound marketing and sales prospecting activities from one central platform. Google Analytics users can sign up to access their lead database with just a click of a button, and within a few minutes will have free access to all the companies that have visited their site in the past three months.
Fastbase, Inc.’s standard Web Leads software allows users to analyze web traffic and provides never-before-seen lead information, including LinkedIn profiles and email addresses, all available for download to CSV and Excel formats.
Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
[mnky_testimonial_slider slide_speed=”3″][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Having data-heavy insight is going to be the key to navigating the digital landscape in 2018 and beyond.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]
Tell us what inspired you to come up with Qutee?
The Web 2.0 revolution has failed to bring the digital democracy it promised. Billions of comments are posted across social media, discussion forums and comments sections each day, but they disappear from a user’s view within hours or minutes. This means huge amounts of valuable information are never explored for deeper insight. As a result, content creators, publishers and brands can’t listen to feedback, and audiences continually feel that they aren’t heard. Online discussion has largely been fractured across the board.
Qutee came about as our engagement and analytics company Sentiment360 evolved. We wanted to put our technology to good use and permanently increase the quality of the online debate for everyone.
How can marketers leverage Qutee to drive sales and marketing?
The Qutee platform offers depths of data and insight regarding online communities that marketers need, particularly at a time when consumer behaviors are increasingly unpredictable and the business world becomes ever more competitive. Because every comment is analyzed, tracked and archived in the Qutee platform, marketers can collect meaningful and useful data from their digital communities in real time. From finding out what kind of content your consumers are most interested in, to why they would or wouldn’t buy your new product, to how your service could best benefit them in the future, Qutee provides a direct channel of communication and market research. This ultimately helps save time and money while optimizing sales and marketing strategies based on real-time audience opinion.
How has Qutee used influencer marketing to enhance its customer database?
We have forged relationships with leading influencers in the gaming and tech spaces since the early days of Qutee. We’ve invited influencers such as Phylol, Huzzy and CapgunTom to curate conversations with their audiences on the platform. This is a strategy we’ve continued to pursue as it has proved successful. We were able to grow our database organically and authentically because these audiences were engaging in the discussions and polls that mattered to them. By granting stock in the business to the influencers who have become successful partners, we’re creating strategic relationships which are key to the sustainable growth of the platform.
How does Qutee differ from its more widely used competitors like Reddit and Twitter?
Unlike Reddit or Twitter, Qutee’s platform allows for real-time data analysis which takes place with every comment posted on the platform. What this means for users, whether that’s the public, brands, charities or influencers, is that you can filter thousands of comments in real time to find the people and comments that interest you within each Qutee data discussion. Existing social media platforms would need a fundamental overhaul of their infrastructure to make this possible. With Qutee, you have access to the audience listening tools you’d otherwise have to pay site owners to access, along with a world-class analytics dashboard without the $5,000 to $10,000 price tag.
With the evolution of AI/ML technology, how are conversational platforms developing?
We have a very different approach to AI/ML. Every commentator tags their comment with a descriptor which could be sentiment-based (e.g. positive/negative/agree/disagree) or specific to the discussion (‘gamer level,’ ‘product feature,’ ‘area of interest’).
This provides in-depth and precise data, and it is also a collaborative approach to AI, unlike the traditional approach of ML where humans are removed from helping improve the AI.
In 2018, do you think data-driven analytical platforms like Qutee will be the need of the hour?
Absolutely. The post-truth era shows no signs of waning. Having data-heavy insight is going to be the key to navigating the digital landscape in 2018 and beyond. Brands, media owners and publishers are going to feel the repercussions of the fake news era with increasing intensity, as will their audiences. Using data to raise the standards of online debate will be a significant way for companies to maintain the trust of their audiences and reputation of their brand.
Could you tell us more about your standout digital moment to date?
The recent FIFA 18 engagement with our strategic influencers showed the power, reach and utility of Qutee. We collected over 1,800 comments and 3,000 poll results in less than 36 hours which identified the key issues with the release: unprecedented market research and data democracy at work for the benefit of all.
Are there any other startups that you are keen on?
Outside our realm of experience, I’m particularly interested in the cognitive enhancement space. I firmly believe that cognitive enhancement will challenge digital AI as well as VR within 25 years.
One word that best describes how you work.
Smart (and fast, with as little ego as possible).
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
WhatsApp. Why? Because so many business contacts outside the US have forsaken email for WhatsApp. Madness!
What is one of your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Fast evolution; don’t overthink and don’t obsess about real outlier issues. We aren’t building software for jet liners! Don’t use PhotoShop laboriously for an idea; sketch it on a piece of paper! Capture the moment of innovation. Also, working by committee is tiresome. Silos of excellence are key with no more than three experts in each silo.
What is on your reading list right now? How do you keep yourself informed?
I’m currently reading “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” (which is superb) and also an historical piece on the Kursk tank battle which intersects neatly with a great short story by Arthur C Clarke called “Superiority.” This story depicts an arms race and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new. Meanwhile, the enemy steadily built up a far larger arsenal of weapons that, while more primitive, were more reliable.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Be kind and be smart.
Who’s the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read?
Elon Musk. Love or hate him, he makes the wheels turn.
Thank you Tim! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.
Tim is CEO of Qutee.com, the first social media site that is powered by data discussions, democratises data and hands the power of analytics technology to everyone for free.
A data-driven comments and discussion platform that empowers online communities to have deeper and more meaningful conversations, where every thought or opinion is valuable and valued. Qutee is all about the best commenting experience on a wide range of topics that allows you to discover and filter conversations utilizing advanced conversational analytics.
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.
North America’s Largest Mobile-only Growth Conference To Include Sessions on Cryptocurrency, Virtual Reality and More
Mobile Growth Fellowship, the mobile industry’s largest network of user acquisition and growth leaders, announced an impressive lineup of speakers and content for its upcoming Mobile Growth Summit 2018. North America’s largest mobile-only growth and marketing conference, Mobile Growth Summit will bring together more than 1,000 attendees and 100 speakers to share insights on how to grow mobile app businesses in 2018. Early-bird registration is now open for the event, taking place February 7 – 8 in San Francisco at the Park Central Hotel.
Now in its fourth year, the Mobile Growth Summit has seen at least 30 percent growth year over year since its founding. This year’s event will be keynoted by Lee Jones, Head of Global App Advertising Sales & Strategy at Google, presenting on “Maximizing User Value and How Google’s Universal App Campaigns Can Help.” The speaker lineup also features industry luminaries from such companies as Facebook, Zynga, Dropbox, Glu Mobile, GSN, Lyft, Pandora, Poshmark, Reddit and others. Notable speakers include:
Ali Nazer, Global Head of Gaming Strategy, Facebook
Lee Jones, Head of Global App Advertising Sales & Strategy, Google
Kady Srinvasan, Global Head of Digital Marketing, Dropbox
Scott Bauer, Executive Director of User Acquisition, GSN
Brian Gilbert, Senior Director of Revenue Operations, Pandora
Esther Hwang, Director of Growth, Poshmark
Andrea Gross, Product Lead, Reddit
Josh Lu, Senior Director of Product Management, Zynga
New to the agenda this year are session tracks called “Calibrate Crypto” and “Calibrate VR,” which explore the latest trends affecting mobile marketers and growth professionals in the areas of cryptocurrency and virtual reality, respectively. The conference will also feature keynotes from Facebook and Google, as well as sessions on topics including user acquisition, monetization, and retention/engagement, such as:
The Best Owned/Unpaid Acquisition Strategies For 2018
Is An Agency Partnership Right For You?
Getting The Most Out Of Mobile Attribution
Winning Facebook Strategies For 2018
Finding Value In Emerging Ad Formats
Empowering Customers Through Augmented Reality
Mobile Game Monetization: What’s Next? among others.
The Mobile Growth Fellowship exists to build the world’s most helpful, friendly and knowledgeable community of mobile experts. As the only mobile media company in the industry that started out as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to education, the fellowship is uniquely equipped to foster community and provide a platform for the exchange of quality content and insights, prioritizing presentations and workshops from app marketers, publishers and other professionals over those of industry vendors.
Latest Canvs Study Proves Audience Emotions Predict Live TV Viewership
‘This Is Us’ Saw a 10% Increase In Live Tune-In Following a Strong Week of Emotional Reactions (ERs) Driven by Talent
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and emotion measurement leader Canvs has announced a joint study on how the television show audience Emotional Reactions (ERs) impact the following week’s live airing viewership. The study on Audience Emotions — Reacting to Actors, Characters, and Programs: Social TV Content and Television Viewing Behavior — found that certain viewer ERs in response to talent can predict an increase in live tune-in the following episode.
via Canvs Audience Emotions ReportDavid Schweidel, Professor of Marketing, Georgetown McDonough
The study on Audience Emotions was led by David Schweidel, professor of marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, who will be incorporating the Canvs emotion measurement dashboard into his course, “Leveraging Social Media.”
Georgetown McDonough is the first partner in Canvs’ new Academic Partnership Program, which launched in fall 2017, and focuses on building strategic partnerships between the Audience Emotions measurement experts at Canvs and key marketing research and psychology professors at key top-tier universities.
Schweidel added, “Talent not only drives emotion but also live viewer tune-in week over week. Further, there is a sustained effect of talent-driven ERs increasing live and time-shifted viewership over multiple weeks.”
With appointment viewing on the decline, it’s more important than ever for networks to understand what is driving live viewing. The study looked at 621 episodes across 55 primetime scripted programs across broadcast networks (ABC, FOX, NBC, CBS, The CW) and spanning genres (Action/Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi/Fantasy). All programs aired Q1 2017 (January – March).
Key Findings from the Canvs Report on Audience Emotions
– Show-specific ERs have a positive impact on live viewing.
– Talent-related ERs had twice the impact as general emotional reactions, but much less common.
– In one example, NBC’s This Is Us enjoyed more than a 10 percent increase in live viewers from episode 17 to 18 thanks to a spike in total ERs driven by talent.
– Furthermore, there is a sustained effect over multiple weeks, with talent-driven ERs increasing live and time-shifted viewership over the following three to four weeks.
Jared Feldman, CEO, Canvs
Jared Feldman, CEO at Canvs, said, “This study proves emotions not only drive increased live viewership week over week but also improve the number of time-shifted viewers in the first three days after a show airing. With OTT and subscription services on the rise, there are a strong indication audience’s Emotional Reactions will align with subscription retention as well.”
Canvs was founded in 2014 to help media companies inform their TV programming results from reactions on Twitter. Today, with API access to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and with their own API, Canvs is empowering media companies, technology platforms, brands, and agencies to decode the troves of social banter across platforms.
Currently, Canvs is the industry standard for measuring emotion. The company uses patented semantic analysis technology to understand how people feel, why they feel that way, and the business impact created for the brands, agencies, and media companies.
ZoomInfo Named Finalist in 2018 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service
Zoominfo’s Salesforce Plugin Accelerates Opportunity Generation Through Perfected Outreach
Zoom Information, Inc., the world’s leading corporate contact database, was named a Finalist in the Sales Enablement category for Best Sales Enablement Solution-New Version, in the 12th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, and will ultimately be a Gold, Silver or Bronze Stevie Award winner in the program. More than 2,500 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition.
Anna Fisher
“We’re thrilled to be a finalist in this year’s Stevie Awards,” said Anna Fisher, ZoomInfo’s Director of Marketing and Head of Lead Generation, adding, “Our customers are the reason we strive to innovate – to take our product suite to the next level, again and again. With the help of our Salesforce Plugin, our product suite enables sales professionals to more quickly find, close and qualify customers without ever leaving their CRM. It’s an honor to be recognized for the results our customers see from our product.”
Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide, in seven specialized judging committees. The 12th annual awards will be presented on Feb. 23 in Las Vegas.
Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards, added, “The 2018 judges were so impressed with the wide range of achievements detailed in the Finalist nominations. We look forward to announcing the Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie placements in Las Vegas next month.”
Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 10,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 60 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide.
Jeff Pedowitz talks about his journey in setting up The Pedowitz Group.
My Journey, My Company: How I Conceived Of The Pedowitz Group (TPG)
As President and CEO, I am responsible for setting the company’s vision and strategic direction along with managing all daily operations. This is my third business. I started in the restaurant business, owning and operating 35 Subway Sandwich franchises. This provided a foundation for operations, controls, and measurements. I also owned a sales training company, which gave me important insights into what sales needs from marketing to be successful.
After working for several software companies managing marketing, professional services, and channels, I discovered Eloqua in the early 2000s and saw the potential.
For the first time, I truly felt a professional calling as it combined my passion for sales, marketing, technology and consulting. I loved the product and the opportunity so much that I joined Eloqua and ran their professional services group. After working with an amazing team and developing many best practices that are today widely adopted, I realized that there was an opportunity to build a company.
My Team, My Champions
TPG Group at the Four Seasons Hotel during 2018 Annual Company Meeting
A few years ago we realized we were having the same challenges as our clients were – marketing had grown complex, there were too many things to do and not enough resources. As a fixed cost, we couldn’t justify adding to the investment as we were already spending a higher amount. So we moved our marketing department into our consulting team and became our own client. Today we have 15 people that regularly work on marketing projects and are led by our VP of Strategy and CMO, Kevin Joyce.
With Kevin Joyce, CMO at TPG
This allows us to use every skill-set we need to drive our marketing programs with no incremental headcount. Our entire team is customer-focused and is driven by creating results and value for our customers.
MarTech Skills: I have a very tech-savvy and adaptive marketing, sales, and branding team
On a scale of 1 to 10 – 10. Our team is highly skilled. We have over 60 sales and marketing technology partners.
Our average employee has at least 5 different platform certifications. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how skilled we are in technology if there isn’t a sound strategy in place. We need to execute and we need to perform.
Marketing needs to be adaptive and agile. Too many marketers make the mistake of focusing on technology as a panacea and don’t focus on the things that really matter – the customer, the needs, the message, the content.
TPG American Express Team who won Teamwork Award
I think young sales professionals are already tech-savvy. They should spend their time learning the business and soft skills – communication, management, and finance.
Learn about the industries their customers are in.
Learn about their customers.
Learn how to really listen.
Learn how to be a problem solver.
Learn how to consult.
And, after all these… the technology is the easiest part.
Marketing technologies are pushing the boundaries of present-day brand engagement and customer experience.
The dynamic of our B2B customer engagement model helps us execute Engagement Economy vision, Strategy, Product and Corporate development at The Pedowitz Group
Certainly, a technology creates more opportunities and challenges, but how we engage with customers is by using the same methodology we implement with our customers – TPG ONE™. TPG ONE is a Customer Lifecycle Map that details out every step of the customer journey, the actions we need to take, who is responsible, the KPIs we use, the content and the message. We also leverage a Clients for Life approach. As much as our customers are interviewing us, we are also interviewing them to ensure we are all in alignment with the expectations and outcomes. We do this before we even start.
By using both approaches, we stay customer-focused and this drives everything we do, from strategy to new solution development to sales.
Tools and strategies we use to create effective B2B content at The Pedowitz Group
From a strategic content development standpoint, we use our TPG ONE™ methodology to develop the right message and the right content delivered in a targeted fashion at the right time through the right channel. We use several different technologies to help us to curate, manage and deliver content including WordPress, Kapost, and Grapevine6.
We leverage Jive and KANBAN boards to manage our work queues and will soon be implementing UberFlip to augment the user experience.
We place special emphasis on measuring the performance of all our marketing analytics and sales reporting.
All of our performance can be evaluated in real-time. Our systems and data all feed into Salesforce.com. We meet weekly with the sales and marketing team to evaluate performance and adjust as needed.
Marketing Strategies and Our Content Roadmap
We create diverse types of content for the web and the social, focussing on a day, the week, a month, and the quarter.
We have had a Passionate Publishers program in place for several years that encourages and rewards employees for submitting relevant content on a regular basis. We get regular contributions from over half our company. The team is prolific in content creation.
We produce blog entries several times per week. In a given month, we produce several videos, podcasts, training snapshots, ebooks, white papers and more. Of all our content, themes around Marketing Operations and Revenue Marketing™, a term coined by TPG Chief Strategy Officer Debbie Qaqish in 2011, continue to perform at the highest levels. This year, based on recent market/customer research, TPG content will focus on these three themes: Accountability, Digital Transformation, and Customer Experience.
With Debbie Qaqish, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal at TPGMe with Bruce Culbert, Chief Service Officer and Principal, TPG
My tactical standpoint on how often should you revisit your automation stack for more effectiveness!
We are big believers in less is more. We try to utilize as much of our current technology as possible and are always trying to rationalize reducing technology vs adding it. Because of the explosion of MarTech tools today, there must be a very strong and compelling business case for us to add something new to our stack. We review our technology on a quarterly basis.
Unification of Sales and Marketing: Nope, Not happening Anytime soon!
Actually no, I don’t see either of these scenarios happening. Sales technology vendors still predominantly sell to sales and marketing technology vendors still predominantly sell to marketing. Until sales and marketing departments actually align and have shared business objectives, goals, and processes, no vendor or technology is going to magically bridge the gap. Marketers should be working actively to align their goals and measurements with sales and vice versa.
My Mentor, My Message to the Martech Industry
I draw inspiration from many places, but one of my favorite stories I like to share is from my time at Eloqua.
It was in my first few months and I had prepared a very sophisticated spreadsheet that had over 50 metrics on it for a marketing executive. I was really proud of it and went to share it with the CFO at the time, Ralf Riekers. He just shook his head and said “Jeff, I don’t need all these metrics to measure how well marketing is performing.
I just need one – Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). I look at how much money we invested in marketing last year and how much revenue we got in return. If the ratio went up from the year before, I am more inclined to approve a budget increase. If it stayed the same or went down, then the budget needs to be reduced until Marketing proves it can generate a return.”
This was 2005. That stays with me every day.
It’s not how much we do or how much we measure. It’s WHAT we do and WHY. Less is more. Quality over quantity. In other words, stop the insanity. Just because we can build more software and create another category, doesn’t mean we should. If we can’t even drive ubiquitous adoption of core marketing platforms, why are we creating more technology for every conceivable category? Let’s help marketing succeed by giving them ONE suite of tools that can be tailored to enable marketers to perform their jobs optimally and ultimately drive sales revenue.
Thank You, Jeff, for answering all our questions. We hope to see you again at MTS, soon.
