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GroupM Interaction 2017: How Businesses Are Moving from Information Age to Intelligence Age

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
GroupM's Interaction 2017: Full-Blown Insight on How Businesses Are Moving from Information Age to Intelligence Age

GroupM, the leading digital media investment firm, has released the preview version of its annual report on the state of digital marketing and its impact on marketers and advertisers. The report, titled “Interaction: Preview Edition for Clients and Partners February 2017”, is published by GroupM’s Worldwide Media and Marketing Forecast, highlighting the challenges in digital marketing across channels. On a positive note, the report predicts the digital share of ad investment in 2017 will jump to around 33%.

Interaction 2017 takes a very cautious approach in defining the digital landscape, suggesting the new and old worlds are contributing equally to new marketing technologies in dollar investments since 2013. In 2016, CMOs spent 72 cents of every new dollar on digital advertising, and 21 cents on TV. In 2017, the balance will swing higher — 77:17, in favor of Digital ad. TV ad spends will remain consistent as per the report.

Top Focus-Areas in Digital Transformation 

2017 is slated to be the year of Big Bang in marketing and advertising technologies. Top 100 CMOs agree that big-brand advertising is definitely moving towards Intelligence Age from the existing Information Age.

Traditionally, marketers have always been building strategies to outperform competitors at every touchpoint along the customer journey. Marketing budgets in 2016 reveal how nothing has changed in marketing, except for the increased complexity in the marketing platforms and their functionalities. While most enterprises now rely on automation for marketing and sales for B2B commerce, a handful of them also prefer to deploy intelligent technologies for social media and mobile apps. Omnichannel customer experience is driving more audience engagement than ever before.

Interaction 2017 reports –

“On a single platform you can advertise, sell, fulfill the order, and deliver customer service. A single piece of content, or more accurately, intellectual property, can be watched in linear form or on demand, as a show, a still, a clip, a multi-hour binge and multiply reconfigured for multiple platforms.”

And what drives customer experience?

Of course, it’s the accuracy and quality of customer data that marketing automation tools mine from omnichannel platforms.

“High-quality data is data that helps you acquire the customer you don’t know and to better understand the customer you do know.”

Read Also: CMOs Own Initiatives in Customer Experience; Focus Sharply Moving Towards No-Screen Engagement

Interaction 2017 suggests CMOs should start owning in-house media groups rather than relying on advertising. The threshold of the usefulness of owned media in 2017 is raised by integrating marketing technologies and sales enablement platforms running on AI, machine learning, and NLP.

“As artificial intelligence becomes part of the taxonomy of everything the structured and unstructured story around the brand, its purpose, origin and the conversation it creates will become part of the consumer experience.”

AI manifesting itself in daily life

How can marketers stay away from AI? Machine learning, voice recognition, NLP and cognitive learning capabilities lies at the heart of every innovation made in marketing technology ecosystem. AI in marketing technology provides brute force to marketing efforts, mimicking human behavior for personalized customer experience.

2017 will throw up battles of the AI innovators – “narrow intelligence” (those who are good at only one thing) versus “general intelligence” (those who are flexible and adaptable). Sans doubt, CMOs are yet to assess the extent to which AI can substitute human customer service interactions.

“This is clearly true of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple which by market capitalization are among the six most valuable companies in the world. It’s true also of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Eight businesses, with data at their core (that are) mapping human behavior, (and in doing so) are becoming the wireframe of human experience.”

AR and VR: From Small Screen to No Screen

According to EIU’s latest report on customer experience, CMOs are focusing on moving towards no-screen engagement by 2020. AR and VR technologies enable marketers to deliver entertainment, social relevancy, personalization, and speed. Advertising in 2016 moved from storytelling to story creation. VR accessories touched sales figure of five million units in 2016. Exquisite customer experience in 2017 will be about delivering a 360-degree and immersive experience, minus the screens.

“It’s likely that the biggest AR deals in the near term will be collaborations between brands and retailers and between sponsors and events. Further applications can be expected in travel, tourism, and real estate. In all cases, the momentum needs to exist for the necessary app installs and for sufficient value to be created for all stakeholders.”

Video is a hotbed of Opportunities

TV still rules; online video platforms fail in longer formats.

Marketers shifting focus towards video marketing over Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and YouTube are yet to achieve the golden “catch”. Despite programmatic featuring as the fastest growing advertising technology, advertisers are unable to accurately measure key engagement metrics: who watched what, where, for how long and on what device.

Interaction 2017 reports, “For every 20 video ads served in the news feed, three are watched for three seconds or more and just one is watched for ten seconds or more.”

To show how video paradigm is shifting away from TV-only platforms, GroupM published a “video taxonomy” card for advertisers.

report1
via GroupM

“The advertisers that account for 90% of television advertising revenue account for between 30% and 40% of the revenue of the digital behemoths.”

OTT: The Confluence of TV, Programmatic and Internet

Over-the-Top (OTT), or Connected TV, is still in its infancy. However, there is no shortage of advertisers who are promoting their brands over OTT. Promising to be an enriching customer-centric platform, the new ad inventory stack allows advertisers to broadcast quality and brand-safe content in an on-demand environment.

“The monetization of OTT bundles is straightforward – subscription sales plus highly targeted advertising less the cost of re-transmission fees. From the advertiser’s point of view, few will be big enough to represent meaningful sources of advertising inventory and it will be up to the agencies to aggregate the pool and harmonize both delivery and measurement.”

GroupM report notes, “Failure to create something that people are prepared to pay for or perceive as an indispensable utility is itself a prescription for failure. And so, the prescription to make TV ubiquitous is simple even if complex to activate.”

Marketers can’t miss Audio in 2017

Audio is the least explored marketing territory in the digital ecosystem. The soundtrack for brand promotion remains an elusive concept despite the bludgeoning budget allocations across web, social, mobile, search, video and e-commerce. Radio and online audio stores continue to have massive customer retention, thanks to the smart media streaming technologies. On-demand audio content provides unmatched consumer interaction, providing a beyond-the-demography snapshot about customer’s listening behavior and emotional intimacy with brands. Players like Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartMedia offer impeccable audio content discovery. However, ROI attributed to audio channels is meager despite collective revenue of over $9 billion and subscribers over 1.5 billion.

“2017 will be a big year for both Pandora and Spotify. Rumors of Pandora’s sale began to swirl in late 2016 and Spotify is expected to go public, and along with Snapchat, create the next two major publicly traded native digital media companies. In the meantime, against a backdrop of rising interest rates iHeartMedia’s immense mortgage obligations may be a barrier to progress.”

The insights provided by Interaction 2017 on every aspect of digital identity for an enterprise proves to be a ground-breaking “handbook” for every CMO who intends to magnify business objectives using digital transformations. Be it AI, mobile-first or programmatic and OTT, Interaction 2017 will remain the epitome of “ethical” branding policies in 2017.

Interaction 2017: GroupM Explains the Disruptive Forces in Paid Ads Ecosystem

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Interaction 2017: GroupM Explains the Disruptive Forces in Paid Ads Ecosystem

GroupM has released its latest annual insight on digital transformation occurring across the organization. The report, titled “Interaction: Preview Edition for Clients and Partners February 2017”, which is part of GroupM’s Worldwide Media and Marketing Forecast, identified the primary disruptors in paid ads ecosystem. Interaction 2017 quotes the duopoly of Facebook and Google in online advertising, trends in ad blocking and the malice of fake news. The critical approach adopted by Interaction 2017 demonstrates the ambiguity in online ad pricing trends.

Google versus Facebook: The Battle of Ad Dominance

The Search Engine Continues to Dominate Digital Advertising

Google provides seven advertising platforms, offering a collective user base of more than one billion. GroupM reported in 2016 –

“Google accounted for 13% of all advertising globally and 42% of digital advertising. Facebook accounted for 5% and 15% respectively.”

Google’s dominance over Facebook may substantially amplify if the numbers from Chinese market are included.

Google dominated the search revenues for a decade, accounting 80% of the total market share. E-commerce retailers, like Amazon, and Pinterest are building alternate search platforms, hinting at fall of Google. Facebook is a more competitive ad platform compared to Google, offering a more diversified ad optimization channel.

Talking of “outsiders” in this battle of ad optimization, Snapchat and Amazon are growing big. In fact, Snapchat is the first “no desktop” platform to have grown into a mega brand advertising channel.

“Advertisers have embraced Snapchat. They like the audience, they like the innovative ad products and they like the vertical video product that fills the screen with tolerable but arresting interruption.”

Interaction 2017 also mentions AOL/Verizon as the “third force” in digital advertising, delivering third largest aggregation of ad impressions. Add to it the programmatic and OTT channels that they offer.

Relevant Content doesn’t have the teeth to drive revenue

Online pricing is an ambiguous territory for most marketers. Despite analytics in place to measure sales and conversions, different advertisers still pay differently for the exact same commodity! The report identifies Google as the disruptor in pricing and commodity allocation strategies.

Interaction 2017 clearly identifies a glaring discrepancy in media pricing policies. Media platforms don’t give any pricing advantage to brand advertisers based on content relevance. Relevant content published in media has a two-pronged advantage for both – publishers and media owners.

Interaction 2017 states –

“No one paid Google until an action occurred. The original AdWords auction was straightforward: a generalized second price auction. Bid a cent more than the other guy and the top position was yours. That did not last long. In 2005 Google introduced the quality score.”

“The premise was that it should take more than money to win a bid and provide a pricing incentive to the bidder with the most relevant response to the query. The dominant factor in the quality score was click-thru rate. Google got paid when the click was made. Clicks were a decent proxy for relevance. Since then relevance has become an increasingly important part of the advertising ecosystem. Never more so than in the Facebook family of apps.”

“2017 will be a big year in the practice of both allocation and attribution. A combination of zero-based budgeting and a need for growth means that every channel will need proven measures and proven value to a greater degree than ever.”

Ad fraud and Malvertising

Closely linked to relevant content pricing is the growing menace of fake news and ad fraud. GroupM’s Interaction 2016 featured a full-length report on the integrity of digital assets supply chain, encompassing challenges like ad fraud, blocking and viewability metrics. Methbot highlights the disparaging policies that premium video platforms deploy to attract bot farms.

The issues of ad fraud increase when methods to measure viewability are regulated by the seller. Advertisers paying the media seller based on impressions endanger the integrity of DSP. With the coming of age of programmatic, there is no justification for advertisers to let go of the opportunity to use ethical methodologies. Self-reporting errors detected in Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat

“Advertisers who choose to use the tools made available by Moat, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify are now extraordinarily well equipped to assess if the impression they purchased was “human viewable” for a given duration.”

Ad blocking, Fake News and Privacy

Customer experience and ad blocking – the two antagonistic trends that leave marketers bedazzled. Ad blocking technology is the biggest hurdle in monetization of apps. While media companies increasingly offer improved customer experiences, stakeholders in app ecosystem are failing to extract feedback on why customers block their ads.

Interaction 2017 asks, “What is the immediate and longer-term economic value of the ad blockers that do persist, and how does that translate into lost opportunity for the advertiser?”

Fake News — the most contagious outcome of 2016 led to belittling of all marketing efforts that brands undertake to generate engagement and retain loyalty. What is Fake News?

“Fake news is not a matter of opinion. Something either happened or it did not.”

Google and Facebook are clear on their agenda in their views about Fake News. Technologies to identify genuine content based on AI will allow marketers to filter their inventories before releasing online.

Cure for fake news in paid ads likely by May 2018

“A way of decreasing the incentives to the bad guys is to increase the incentives to the good guys. A simple adjustment in the revenue sharing model would go a long way.”

Finally, to what percentage should enterprises focus on protecting their users’ identity from media owners?

100%, says Group M.

“Companies can’t use and source individual’s data unless they have direct consent from the consumer. Data types that are protected from sharing are user cookies, first-party data, web credentials and device credentials. The ePrivacy draft, set to be effective from May 2018, will impose heavy penalties on violators who share user data unscrupulously.  The fines could be up to 5% of the global annual turnover.

The insights provided by Interaction 2017 on every aspect of digital identity for an enterprise proves to be a ground-breaking “handbook” for every CMO who intends to magnify business objectives using digital transformations. Be it AI, mobile-first or programmatic and OTT, Interaction 2017 will remain the epitome of “ethical” branding policies in 2017.

Read Also: RiskIQ Report: Malvertising Rose by 132% in 2016 over 2015; Threat Actors Use Programmatic Advertising to Target Online Audience

Allbound Unveils myChannelScore for Assessing and Tracking Channel Partner Program Effectiveness

By
Avinash Duduskar
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0
ChannelScore Allbound sample

Allbound, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Partner Sales Acceleration solution, announces myChannelScore™, a free online assessment for CEOs, sales executives, and channel leaders to establish a baseline for channel program performance, and to help channel operators set priorities for accelerating recurring revenue through partner programs.

myChannelScore grades partner programs across four key attributes: content marketing, collaboration, customer success and culture. A downloadable report provides personalized recommendations and best practices that can then be put in place immediately to help improve areas with weaker scores.

“The role of channel partners has evolved to account for the entire customer lifecycle,” said Scott Salkin, CEO and Founder of Allbound. “With recurring revenue now the number one performance indicator for business health and growth potential, partners are playing as critical a role for product adoption and customer success as they once did for demand generation and closing deals. As executives are tasked with scaling faster while spending less, there’s a need to determine how they can build a best-in-class channel program that not only reduces customer acquisition costs, but reduces churn and, most importantly, drives better outcomes for the customer. myChannelScore allows them to assess how their channel is performing and continuously identify what improvements are needed to build a more comprehensive channel program for the subscription economy.”

In addition to providing executives with a clear, visual picture of exactly how their organization’s channel is performing, myChannelScore compares results against other channel professionals and provides baseline metrics for ongoing analysis, guidance, and improvements to channel strategies that impact sales velocity with partners. Already, more than 50 organizations with channel programs have used myChannelScore to evaluate the effectiveness of their channel partner programs and get personalized suggestions to improve their channel sales and customer success strategies.

“Your grade is a measure of the readiness of your channel program in today’s more sophisticated, digital marketplace where companies are selling Cloud and SaaS solutions that range from simple to extremely complex,” explained Salkin. “Now businesses can benchmark themselves against similar companies while also tracking their performance over time using the Allbound platform. It’s a win-win-win — for manufacturers, partners and their shared customers.”

myChannelScore is complementary to the Allbound’s partner sales acceleration platform, which provides companies with a turnkey SaaS platform for partner onboarding, enablement, content marketing, pipeline management and customer success.

Later in 2017, Allbound plans to share insights from the data obtained from myChannelScore to provide information to the market about how businesses are building successful channel programs that accelerate revenue, highlighting key trends and commonalities.

ChannelScore Allbound sample

To access myChannelScore, visit https://mychannelscore.com

How Wingify Built its Second MarTech Product after VWO

By
Paras Chopra
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0
Pushcrew web push notifications

Pushcrew CEO Paras ChopraWhen I started up Wingify back in 2010, I knew I had hit upon a problem that needed to be solved and was just waiting for someone to come and do so.

Visual Website Optimizer, now known widely as just VWO, our first product, wanted to help marketers build better websites by A/B testing various elements – headings, colors, positioning, buttons, etc. The first version of VWO was very simple – it was just A/B Testing (and it did it well enough for us to be among market leaders). Today, it is a complete conversion optimization software, doing almost everything a modern marketer would need to increase conversion rates. I remember how VWO evolved along with our own marketing: we knew what our customers needed because we were using the product ourselves. It made building the product, thinking about the roadmap, and figuring out the user experience incredibly easy.

One of the things that helped us take VWO to a bigger audience was writing about it. In the beginning, I wrote extensively about what I was building, why I was building it, who it would benefit, how to use it better and so on. I realized I enjoyed writing, and of course, getting read. As VWO grew, we grew this into a content engine that helped our customers and our audience.

As we grew VWO’s blog, we stumbled onto a problem that writers face: how to get people to come back to your site and read more. Newsletters are okay, tweets are great, Facebook posts too, but these are all dependent on readers being on that particular platform – email, Twitter, or Facebook. What else could we do? What other channels are there?

At that time, the entrepreneur in me had an aha moment. If we were so obsessed with getting customers to return to our blog to read, we realized how important this would be to other marketers too.

This idea stayed in my head for a while, until I discovered web browser notifications, and saw that smart marketers at organizations were catching on. We saw the potential, and having thought about this very thing for so much time, I saw the opportunity and rushed to make an MVP

The first version was very simple but it worked. We then fully built PushCrew, customers saw that we had built something useful. They came and bought PushCrew.

Pushcrew web notifications

And now, as the team works on making PushCrew better and more and more useful to marketers, I took a step back to think about the product, and what it was actually doing: the longer view if you will. It didn’t take long for me and the team to figure out that the problem we were trying to solve was massive, that the scale of this was ridiculous, and that we were trying to paint a fence with a toothbrush.

We now fully understand that PushCrew is not just about sending notifications: It’s trying to solve the most fundamental marketing problem there is – communication, contact: the marketer’s last mile.

Web push notifications opt-in sample
Anyone who has ever done any sort of marketing knows that this is the clincher. As Entrepreneur magazine put it in 2014, “The last mile in marketing connects a customer to the seller through communication that occurs close to the point of purchase.” This is when the customer turns around, chooses to return, and gives you the money.

Pushcrew web push notifications

Push notifications were able to solve this exact problem. For example, if I had landed on the website of a particular magazine I’d liked – science journal Nautilus, for instance, which I actually subscribe to. And if something had come up making me move on, and forget what I was reading; I could even have left in the middle of filling up billing information on the subscriber form.

A push notification from Nautilus may take me straight back to the website, and I can finish what I started: reading or buying.

Which is what makes push notifications interesting, and what made us build PushCrew in the first place – its immediacy, that instantaneous stimuli to take an action.

Isn’t that what a marketer yearns for?

But again, push notifications, as we suspected, and have discovered, don’t work in a vacuum. Your other marketing is important, that has an effect on how your push notifications perform. Your brand is important, what you mean to your customer is important. I will definitely click on a notification from Nautilus, but will I agree to be sent notifications from a spammy 3-notifications-an-hour service company in the first place? No.

Which is an important point – perhaps the most important? As the CEO of a company which has now built two successful MarTech products, this clearer to me than it ever was: The Marketing in MarTech still has an important bearing on how we interact and engage with a brand. We might build the most sophisticated tools for a brand to communicate with a customer, but unless the customer believes in the value the brand gives them, they will not care, and we shouldn’t expect them to.

Maropost Introduces Da Vinci to Herald AI Renaissance in MarTech

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Maropost Introduces Da Vinci to Herald AI Renaissance in MarTech

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…” Maropost evidently takes it very earnestly, even as it keeps releasing series of cutting-edge innovations for holistic B2B digital transformation. Now, the leading enterprise software provider for email messaging and marketing collaboration has officially entered the AI race for dominance in marketing automation with its latest product. On Tuesday, Maropost introduced Da Vinci into its proprietary marketing cloud inventory.

Why would you love Da Vinci in your martech stack?

Apart from drawing an obvious analogy to the Italian polymath, Maropost’s Da Vinci is the most sophisticated and fully-functional enterprise AI platform available to marketers. Da Vinci will compete with other “creative” leaders in the AI industry, including Salesforce’s Einstein and IBM Watson.

“Maropost Marketing Cloud leads the industry in tracking and analytics, automation, and machine learning,” says Ross Andrew Paquette, CEO, and Chairman of Maropost. “Our machine intelligence technology is the culmination of all our past research and the logical next step for the future. Da Vinci is the most powerful and functional artificial intelligence available to an enterprise at the present.”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

“Leonardo da Vinci revolutionized art, mathematics, and engineering in the 15th century. We aim to do the same for the digital and marketing industries today,” says Paquette. “Maropost’s Da Vinci marks the beginning of the A.I. renaissance (in martech).”

Built on an ingeniously developed machine learning algorithm, Maropost’s Da Vinci is a unified product in Cloud, offering unparalleled insights for optimal action. Like its other products, Maropost thought of conceiving Da Vinci by collaborating with its clients, ensuring seamless integration with its existing proprietary solutions and products.

Da Vinci will introduce machine learning intelligence into Maropost’s sales and marketing automation platform that already boasts of some of the most intuitive tech capabilities. CMOs can scale their tech integrations logically without adding any siloes in the workflow.

Da Vinci Will Revolutionize Email Marketing Automation

Maropost Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud have cross-functional capabilities to amplify marketing efforts across customer’s LTV. By adding AI technology into Maropost Marketing Cloud, marketers can “paint” a completely new canvas on customer journey –accurate, engaging and ROI-centric. Da Vinci’s algorithms will leverage the unique user profile to define the most relevant content and product recommendations based on age, gender, device usage, buying behavior, social engagement and even profession! The swift integration between Maropost Marketing Cloud and Da Vinci will allow marketers to schedule email marketing campaigns with higher accuracy. Da Vinci adds its intelligence in determining the optimal time to send each email based on the individual’s purchasing, browsing, and email habits.

“There are a lot of products on the market that claim to have cracked artificial intelligence but they are simply using automation disguised as machine learning,” says Paquette. “Maropost has created a truly cognitive algorithm that can experiment on, learn from, and adapt to the user all by itself. The more you use it, the more powerful it becomes.”

The implications for e-commerce and publishing companies are particularly huge. Product recommendations can be inserted into emails and other communications based on the recipient’s past purchases and viewing habits. Content can also be individually tailored based on the recipient’s reading preferences and history. All communications can be scheduled based on the recipient’s past behavior and engagement levels to maximize open and conversion rates.

Da Vinci = Intelligent + Creative + Effortless

Artificial Intelligence technology in martech is the hottest topic in the industry.  According to a recent report on AI market by technology, the industry is projected to touch $16 billion by 2022, growing at 63.9% CAGR. Maropost’s Da Vinci is the ubiquitous choice for marketers looking for automation and AI technology in single Cloud bundle. The biggest advantage of automating email marketing campaigns with AI capabilities is the kind of efficiency marketers can induce in their efforts, without sidelining creativity. As customer experience climbs the ladder in personalization, having Da Vinci in the stack allows marketers to boost open rates,

The biggest advantage of automating email marketing campaigns with AI capabilities is the kind of efficiency marketers can induce in their efforts, without sidelining creativity. As customer experience climbs the ladder in personalization, having Da Vinci in the stack allows marketers to boost open rates, CTRs and subscriptions.

As AI technologies take the center stage in martech stacks, marketers can fine-tune their email campaigns, offering 1:1 hyper-personalization for highest readability and deliverability.

Next in line — An AI to detect fake news? 

Revel Partners with Adobe to “Keep Innovation Flywheel Spinning” in B2B Digital Transformation

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Revel Partners Adobe to "Keep Innovation Flywheel Spinning" in B2B Digital Transformation

Revel Consulting, the leading collaboration platform for digital disruption, announced a key partnership with Adobe to help B2B enterprises create new and effective ways to engage customers. The latest partnership with Adobe is an extension and expansion of Revel’s strategy to integrate new technology platforms, products and services across its core capabilities in digital disruptions.

The partnership will initially focus on sales and marketing technology, with Revel leveraging the full technical capabilities of Adobe Marketing Cloud as an Adobe Solution Partner to craft digital roadmaps, design disruptive experiences and build impactful customer journeys. Leveraging Adobe Marketing Cloud, Revel will help companies rapidly prototype and test products; develop deeper insights on customer preferences; and deploy sophisticated sales and marketing strategies that deliver the right content, at the right time and in the right context.

According to IDC, worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will grow to more than $2.1 billion in 2019 with a CAGR of 16.8% over the 2014-2019 forecast period. Spending on digital transformation technologies in the US will follow a similar trajectory, reaching nearly $732 million in 2019.

via Revel
via Revel

“Revel’s clients are asking us for sales and marketing solutions that scale in a digital, cloud-first business environment,” said Tim Bowman, MD at Revel and head of the firm’s Strategy community. “As a firm that’s proudly ‘born digital,’ customer obsessed, and innovation driven, we’re perfectly positioned to help companies navigate the digital world, and our partnership with Adobe gives our customers one more way to succeed.”

Revel’s partnership with Adobe comes at a crucial time when B2B companies are progressively beholding to reinforce relations with their customers directly through digital channels. According to a report on customer experiences (CX) by Gartner, 89% of senior B2B marketing executives compete primarily on the basis of digital customer experience. More than 50% of organizations will implement significant business model changes to improve them.

“Adobe is the market leader in digital marketing technology and fits squarely into Revel’s strategic plan to enhance the services our communities offer our customers,” said Laszlo Kismarton, a digital transformation expert at Revel.

“As we continue to build our network, we’re excited about how this Adobe partnership will accelerate value for our customers, keep the innovation flywheel spinning, and potentially expand to new applications beyond sales and marketing.”

via Revel
via Revel

In the same study, Gartner revealed how poor CX attribute as a damaging factor in digital business projects.  30% respondents agreed that poor CX is a significant factor that affects B2B digital business processes.

“We are pleased to be working with Revel Consulting to help transform B2B companies into Experience Businesses,” said Tony Sanders, senior director of global SI and Americas partner sales at Adobe. “Revel is uniquely positioned to help companies thrive in the digital world and will help prepare them to make the best use of Adobe’s digital marketing technology to create unmatched experiences for their customers.”

Currently, Revel is organized into five communities, each focusing on different phases in LTV of digital business transformation, connected together to ensure a flywheel of innovation built into its customer engagements. These communities are –

via Revel
via Revel

These communities are designed for maximum agility and flexibility in the face of ever-evolving technological capabilities, consumer expectations and client needs in the B2B ecosystem. Its operating model makes Revel uniquely positioned to help its clients stay ahead of three megatrends – omnichannel-to-ubiquity, monetizing trust, and Agile-Everything – looming on the horizon for companies across all industries.

Digital transformation is no longer a technology trend; it is a Center of Excellence focusing at the center of business strategies across all industry segments and markets. Digital transformation offers a critical opportunity for companies to redefine CX, achieve new levels of enterprise productivity, and create competitive advantage. Enterprise investments in digital transformation will constitute the majority of growth in technology markets over the next five years, making it a priority for technology vendors as well. CMOs in 2017 agree that digital transformations as a “matter of survival”, and consider it as a symbol of economic maturity.

Adobe Marketing Cloud offers a complete set of marketing solutions, enabling marketers to gain deep insights into customers, build personalized campaigns and manage digital assets for web, social and mobile. Revel’s collaboration with Adobe Marketing Cloud will allow CMOs and senior marketing executives to implement critical digital transformation with end-state vision for their B2B campaigns.

 

New Version of Invisible.io SmartCloud Connect for Salesforce Announced within Outlook for iOS

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
New Version of Invisible.io SmartCloud Connect for Salesforce Announced within Outlook for iOS

Invisible.io, the leading enterprise automation platform, has announced a powerful extension for its product SmartCloud Connect for Salesforce to support mobile email app Outlook for iOS.

Email marketing and mobile form an interesting pair. Despite the significant growth in mobile marketing, email apps are yet to deliver the expected ROIs from marketing campaigns. Invisible.io seems to have identified the gap between mobile customer experience and email marketing by allowing email marketers to automate campaigns for Outlook on iOS.

“Using iOS devices for constant access to Salesforce business data, powered by SmartCloud Connect intelligent tools, changes the way how people do business, freeing them to spend more time on sales instead of performing routine operations. This is why proper automation is critical for any business – people can be more productive and flexible,” said Vlad Voskresensky, CEO of Invisible.io.

2017 is slated to be the year of reckoning for enterprises that focus on bringing enriching mobile experience. Mobile-first is no more a future aspiration for CMOs. SmartCloud Connect for Salesforce adds a personal touch to enterprise-level communication tools such as Outlook, Office 365, Gmail and IBM Notes.

smartcloud2

By extending capabilities of SmartCloud Connect, Invisible.io allows iPhone and iPad users to experience the unparalleled power of Salesforce within their preferred email app. It will remove the pain of switching between different applications, digging through business information or manually logging recent activity data into CRM. SmartCloud Connect turns your iPhone into a powerful communication tool, combining traditional interaction channels and business intelligence and allowing you to make smarter decisions faster.

Meanwhile, Invisible.io is also offering a new PaaS-based enterprise automation platform for ISVs and businesses, enabling marketers to deploy and run integration solutions without any development effort. Invisible.io’s new PaaS platform is a fully cloud-based data integration platform that significantly lowers the time and cost to develop, deploy, and run such integrations.

Vlad Voskresensky says, “Should you be a SaaS Provider looking for integration of your system into the personal tools of your users or CIO of a large enterprise trying to bring company-wide automation into Inbox and Calendar of your employees, Invisible.io has unique offerings which help you to get this task done in a matter of days.”

Invisible.io offers full-scale merging solutions for existing apps, leveraging AI technology to track past interactions and experiences. Marketers can have a unified perspective on past and present managerial decisions over a simple, user-friendly UI dashboard and chatbot communication box.

Oh Snap Inc.! It’s outta control.

By
Avinash Duduskar
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1
Snap spectacles

Snapchat logoSnap Inc. the parent company of SnapChat officially filed to go public on 2nd Feb.
Snap Inc., a “camera company” is reportedly seeking a $25 billion valuation in its IPO, expected to happen in March. The self-described camera company considers Apple, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, YouTube and Twitter its rivals. Snap acknowledged in its IPO filing that it would likely be the first company to sell non-voting stock in an IPO on a U.S. stock exchange.
The founders of Google and Facebook also took steps to preserve significant control when they went public, creating two classes of stock, with different voting rights. Take a look at Snap’s funding received so far.

Snapchat funding
Data from Crunchbase

Snap’s approach is unprecedented in that it wants to deprive shareholders any say in corporate matters whatsoever.

Spiegel and his co-founder Robert Murphy each hold more than 44% of the total voting power of Snap, together representing a super majority of nearly 89% of the votes while owning shares worth $5 billion each.
Here’s what Snap’s other shareholders won’t be able to do:

  • Nominate, elect or replace board members
  • Submit shareholder proposals
  • Pressure the board to fire the CEO (or anyone else in management, for that matter)
  • Approve or block a merger or takeover of Snap
  • Identify when a hedge fund or another large investor has purchased more than 5% of the company

The company says its advertising business is growing quickly. It reported $58.7 million in revenue for 2015, and grew that to $404.5 million in 2016. Sadly, with strong revenue growth came big losses. Snap lost $372.9 million in 2015 and $514.6 million this past year, more than its total revenue.
Twitter was also struggling to generate a profit when it went public, while Facebook was not.

Snap vs Twitter vs Facebook
Data from CNBC

Understandably, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on Friday he wasn’t impressed by the numbers in Snap’s IPO registration. “I think their growth comes at a considerable expense. I think they’re paying a lot for their growth,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street,” a day after Snap officially filed for an IPO.

It’s brilliant to grow revenue 7x in the same year unless your losses outstrip your revenue. And that can often turn battle hardened Wall Street traders queasy.
“They do have the right demo and they are a camera company trying to tell a good story.
But at the same time I was like, wow, you’re spending a lot of money. Are you ready to come public?” Cramer said.

On Thursday, the social media company told investors in the filing it “may never achieve or maintain profitability.”
“We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability,” the filing said. Other similar companies, like Twitter, have also included similar language in their public offerings.

The company will spend $400 million a year on Google Cloud services over the next five years, meaning Google might make more money from Snapchat than Snapchat does.
https://twitter.com/pierce/status/827313226203271168
The investor in me wants to risk losing 50% on the chance I could make 10x on Snap like others did with Facebook. This promises to be the most interesting IPO in a long long time, we’re tuned in Spiegel.

Audiense Receives $4.75 Million Funding from Internet Entrepreneur and Tech Investor Mel Morris

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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Audiense Receives $4.75 Million Funding from Internet Entrepreneur and Tech Investor Mel Morris

Mel Morris, a renowned tech investor and entrepreneur, has invested $4.75 million in Audiense, a SaaS for customer experience and engagement. Mel was the former long-term chairman of King Digital (creators of Candy Crush). The latest investment in the SaaS platform will boost its growth plans, which include scaling-up its sales and marketing functions. The funding will enable the firm to expand into North America.

Javier Burón, co-founder and CEO of Audiense, said: “Four thousand Audiense customers are already enjoying the benefits of our SaaS capabilities, but we’re only just scratching the surface of the market. Companies are beginning to understand how vital consumer insights are to their future success or even to their continued existence. Massively positive feedback from our rapidly growing customer base would suggest we have the right solution at exactly the right time.”

About his VC funding to Audiense, Mel Morris said:

“An estimated $15bn will be spent on social marketing by businesses in the USA alone this year, and delivering more strategic and measurable value to those spending it is going to be key. I believe the Audiense team and tech, packed as it is with genuine and deep expertise in socially-acquired data and insight is superbly poised to help businesses extract maximum value from their social marketing budgets.”

Audiense is one of only two Twitter Official Partners worldwide for both Data/Insights and Advertising. It leverages the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform to determine unique and powerful personality insights from audience data. The London-based SaaS provider has so far raised $7.99 million in four funding rounds since its inception in 2011. Other investors in Audiense include B2B tech investor Chris Underhill and angel investor Stephen Bullock. Mel Morris, Underhill and Bullock currently hold the position of Non-Executive Chairman at Audiense.

Mel Morris has made investments in competitive intelligence for search marketers Adthena, SaaS automation platform for customer marketing BriefYourMarket.

Confirmit Launches New Survey Designer to Improve Customer Engagement Campaigns

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Confirmit Launches New Survey Designer to Improve Customer Engagement Campaigns

Confirmit, the leading market research and customer feedback platform, has launched a cutting-edge survey designer for online survey publishers and marketers. The new Confirmit Survey Designer tool will remove the complexity of advanced survey creation, enabling marketer researchers and surveyors to build interactive questionnaire in less than half the time. Confirmit’s survey designer will help surveys to tackle declining response rates using easy-to-use advanced design capabilities.

Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a crucial aspect of acquiring, engaging and retaining customers. Surveys help in capturing customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions. However, creating surveys for specific markets is an arduous process, taking more than just creativity and strategy. In an attempt to stick to best practices in market research force marketers to outsource their survey campaigns to third-party agencies.

Terry Lawlor, Executive VP, Product Management explains: “Organizations know that it is imperative to create surveys that are fun, engaging, and reduce respondent fatigue. However, this means that designers can spend a significant part of their working day on the authoring and programming process.

“Confirmit Survey Designer provides them with all the sophisticated functionality they need to create highly engaging questionnaires, using a class-leading user interface that outperforms anything else on the market.”

Confirmit Survey Designer has been developed to make it quicker and easier for users to create highly engaging surveys, saving designers many hours of work. The intuitive user interface makes the creation of feedback and research programs extremely easy while still allowing for the resulting surveys to offer a feature-rich, compelling and engaging experience to respondents. This provides the ability to author a questionnaire once, then deploy it across multiple channels – including web, CAPI, telephone, mobile, SMS, IVR and more – to ensure the most efficient use of design time while delivering high-quality results.

confirmit
Confirmit Survey Designer

By adding Confirmit Survey Designer, the NYC-based market research platform intends to boost its existing VOC suite across online channels. The designer tool has been built in close collaboration with key stakeholders specifically to combat the struggle that organizations face with declining response rates and low respondent engagement.

Confirmit Survey Designer is an easy- to-learn solution that is simple to move to from other solutions. It allows designers to use a wide range of features that are proven to increase response rates and capture insights quickly and easily, including innovative question types, multimedia clips and a powerful array of feedback methods.

Confirmit Survey Designer is available at no cost for its existing Professional Authoring customers and complements that environment so designers can use either one or toggle between the two when designing a single survey.

Established in 1996, Confirmit provides SaaS solutions for feedback and research. It acquired social media analytics and tools platform Integrasco in January 2014, taking extending its vision to ensure highest data integrity and survey accuracy in its market research operations.

CMOs Own Initiatives in Customer Experience; Focus Sharply Moving Towards No-Screen Engagement

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
CMOs Own Initiatives in MarTech Innovations for Customer Experience; Focus Sharply Moving Towards No-Screen Engagement

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has released a ground-breaking report on how CMOs are change drivers in martech and which technologies will impact their businesses in next five years. Following the trend on how marketers envision customer experience (CX) in their martech adoption, the report titled, “The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience” explores how CMOs are aligning their direct action to magnify brand equity through personalized CX. One of the most startling outcomes of the report is the belligerence with which tech innovations are pushing the boundaries of CX, aiming at the small screen and no-screen experience by 2020. The latest report by EIU on CX is sponsored by Marketo.

Marketers lead the pack of professionals when it comes to adopting latest technologies and innovations.  A majority of the marketers cherry-pick technologies to automate their business processes, cutting through siloed workflow to smoothen internal collaboration. While marketing automation remains the pivot of all tech-integrations possible today, marketers are spending more time, money and effort to understand how innovations can help them understand CX and its personalization better.

499 Senior Marketing Executives Interviewed; 86% Say “We Will Own the End-to-End CX by 2020”

via Economist Intelligence Unit
via Economist Intelligence Unit

Most CMOs acknowledge that their primary task is to deeply understand customer buying behavior and intent, and the context that drives their brand engagement. While it is hard to define CX for each customer, CMOs agree that “a single, best version of customer truth” can bridge the gap in providing best personalization. Innovations in CX technology will drive this single, universal definition of customer truth based on data analytics mined from various layers of engagement – offline, online, web, social, mobile and in-store apps.

Marketers interviewed during the survey agree that the level of personalization in CX at multiple touch points along the customer journey is an essential factor in future marketing strategies.

Future Innovations Focusing on Personalization for Mobile and Networks; IoT, Wearable and AI also Share the Limelight

eiu-2

The relationship between brand and customer is evolving based on how marketers analyze data. Courtesy mobile and social media, marketers have a powerful combination of technology to figure out customer behavior in different environments.

According to the report, 59% respondents believe mobile and networks will have the biggest influence on their department, while 39% see IoT as the leading technology for CX.

“Although it helps, it’s not just experiencing with particular platforms that count most. It’s almost like you need a different kind of thinker because the skills are changing,” says Kristin Lemkau, CMO of JPMorgan Chase.

Analytics and Creativity: The Two Key Forces Every CMO Needs to Juice

eiu3

Personalization helps marketers acquire, engage, retain and leverage customers with higher proficiency. Technology excellence allows marketers to segment their audiences according to their LTV, enabling the brand to grow, win and sustain in the long run.

“If I can’t combine analytical and creative smarts, it’s virtually impossible to be an effective CMO,” says Jonathan Martin, Pure Storage.

Focus Areas in CX: Need for Speed, Intimacy, Relevancy and Consistency

eiu4

CMOs are increasingly leveraging technology to provide a fulfilling CX across mobile, social and app ecosystems. The cumulative effect of content, analytics, and advertising helps sustain the CX in most cases. However, marketers are yet to “hit” the golden ratio in CX that delivers entertainment, social relevancy, personalization, and speed. Use of machine learning, AI and geo-targeting are likely contenders in driving enriching CX in coming months. Predictive analytics in social branding can be used to create moment-by-moment CX in any campaign.

Fragmented Audiences, Unlimited Data Shelves: CMO Must Embrace Account-Based Marketing to Reach Pinnacle of CX

Irony exists in technology too!  While it is possible that customers are accessing the same content and brand messages that marketers want them to, it is quite a complex process to mash up technical and social aspects into one CX frame. Account-based marketing (ABM) for unique CX environment will play a very important role in simplifying the process. A unified CX platform for marketing, advertising, and sales based on ABM integrated to marketing automation and CRM is what CMOs need to set their eyes on.

Hootsuite Injects Social Ad Optimization Platform AdEspresso into Its Paid Content Inventory

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Hootsuite Injects Social Ad Optimization Platform AdEspresso into Its Paid Content Inventory

How does Hootsuite intend to tackle the growing ambiguity in social content?

By offering social marketers a “shot of caffeine – AdEspresso”.

The growing malice of Fake News has prompted the most widely used social media engagement platform to embrace paid content strategy with enhanced ad optimization. Hootsuite injected its ingeniously curated Enterprise-strength social advertising optimization with AdEspresso. Hootsuite Ads will now be optimized for Facebook and Instagram. Today, the Vancouver-based social media management solutions provider announced the acquisition of AdEspresso, the leading SaaS tool for Facebook and Instagram ad optimization. The acquisition will allow marketers to reignite the inventories of Hootsuite Ads, providing brands to engage customers across paid, earned and proprietary social media. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

Fake news is not a new phenomenon. They have been around for a variety of reasons – for gaining political mileage, for entertainment, to keep the gossip mills running, or for pure malice. By bringing AdEspresso into its stable, Hootsuite intends to grow its paid content inventory organically with a badge of authenticity. Add to it the fact that AdEspresso, a top Facebook global ad partner, offers innovative advertising technology solutions to help organizations reach an audience of over a billion people on Facebook and Instagram. The acquisition will allow Hootsuite to build best-in-class social marketing solution platform, enabling brand marketers to increase awareness, inspire brand loyalty, drive leads, and ultimately revenue – without leveraging false news and malvertising.

Read Also: RiskIQ Report: Malvertising Rose by 132% in 2016 over 2015; Threat Actors Use Programmatic Advertising to Target Online Audience

“Our mission has always been to deliver an easy-to-use, effective product to our customers that truly reaps results at scale,” said Massimo Chieruzzi, CEO of AdEspresso.

“We have had a fantastic partnership with Hootsuite, and are thrilled to join the Hootsuite family to provide organizations with a world-class platform to maximize their social marketing strategies,” added Armando Biondi, COO of AdEspresso.

via Hootsuite
via Hootsuite

AdEspresso, founded in 2013, has raised #3.2 million in four rounds of funding. The CA-based ad optimization platform specializes in providing user-friendly A/B testing variants to cater to creative and demographically distinct customer base. Hootsuite users can leverage AdEspresso Campaign Editor to create a galaxy of ads in minutes, testing new ideas and experiments to maximum ROI in just one click. Marketers can lead ad campaigns through CRM and email automation leveraging AdEspresso’s Data Synchronization tool linked to Facebook Ad account.

“Social advertising has become a vital aspect of marketing; companies are looking for ways to reach an active, engaged audience while getting more mileage from content and advertising spend. With AdEspresso, we’re bringing our users a simple, powerful, battle-tested solution that delivers measurable ROI.” said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite.

Read Also: Facebook MMM Portal Launched; Adds DoubleVerify as Partner to Attract Programmatic Ad Buying Platforms

With its latest acquisition, Hootsuite has ramped up its social media productivity significantly. This is the eleventh acquisition for the company, which comes nearly a year after it acquired Sales Prodigy, a social monitoring platform for sales professionals in March 2016. Brands rely on paid content to improve reputation on social media by tracking messages and mentions. However, it is often time-consuming and laborious task, delivering shortened ROI. Hootsuite+AdEspresso makes social media management smarter, data-driven and more customer-centric guarding brands against fake news promoters, malvertising syndicates and other external threats.

Elite Veteran Ad Tech Advisor and Investor Dr. Mark Grether Appointed as Sizmek’s Executive Chairman

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Elite Veteran Adtech Advisor and Investor Dr. Mark Grether Appointed as Sizmek's Executive Chairman

Sizmek, the leading Open Ad Management firm for programmatic, announced the appointment of Dr. Mark Grether as its Executive Chairman. Dr. Grether is replacing outgoing President and CEO Neil Nguyen, who will be staying through April-end to see the smooth transition of power at Sizmek. The latest transfer of power at the top management comes barely a week after Sizmek announced the launch of Data Hub, a data-centralizing ad tech ecosystem offered with its Programmatic Creative solution.

Dr. Mark Grether introduced himself as new Sizmek Executive Chairman via blog post, addressing the stakeholders and media partners about future growth plans.

Dr. Mark Grether wrote:

Dr. Mark Grether, Executive Chairman at Sizmek
Dr. Mark Grether, Executive Chairman at Sizmek

“As Sizmek’s new Executive Chairman, I’ll be spearheading the execution of our strategy and growth as the premier independent ad management company in the ad tech space. I am writing to introduce myself, and share some thoughts on why I’m excited to be leading the charge at Sizmek.”

Grether, a renowned and industrious ad tech veteran and investor, has led advisory boards at mobile ad tech company AppLift, video advertising platform ShowHeroes, data management platform zeotap and ad tech consulting and growth acceleration firm Connect Digital Partners.He was the co-founder and global COO at WPP’s Xaxis programmatic media department.

Read Also: Sizmek Announces Centralized DMP Integration to Enrich Programmatic Ad Inventories

Dr. Grether also thanked his incumbent predecessor Nguyen by adding, “I’d also like to thank Neil Nguyen. Through his leadership over the past 13 years, Sizmek has become the market’s largest open ad platform and the second largest server of digital ads.”

Nguyen, at Sizmek, led the ad tech innovation team to build this company from $40 million in annual revenue and 200 employees to hitting a peak of $420 million and over 2,000 employees. The highlight of his career is the formation of DG Mediamind.

Sizmek is already on the martech radar by virtue of its powerful programmatic platform, enabling top brands to activate and manage campaigns across any channel, anywhere in the world. Currently, Sizmek’s product suite for ad tech consists of Programmatic Creative, Dynamic Creative, Rich Media, Strike Ad, Data, Peer39, Ad serving and MDX-NXT. A comprehensive ad differentiation platform that engages customers and drives performances, Sizmek led by Dr. Grether is expected to introduce many cutting-edge advertising intelligence and performance drivers in 2017.

MSN and VigLink partner to unlock a new global revenue stream

By
Avinash Duduskar
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MSN Viglink logos

MSN and VigLink, the leading platform for monetizing content-driven commerce, today announced an exclusive global partnership. VigLink will monetize all content across MSN and related properties including international markets, verticals, and select homepage elements.

Looking to innovate and find new revenue opportunities, MSN chose to partner with VigLink in order to tap into the commercial intent within its content. VigLink’s unique technology and broad network of more than 65,000 merchants allow MSN to capitalize on the best custom deals for its global audience.

Additionally, VigLink’s technology blends seamlessly without altering user experience. On MSN.com, VigLink automatically turns existing commercial links into revenue-generating affiliate links. Further increasing MSN’s yield, VigLink’s Custom Insert adds new affiliate links on contextual keywords within article content. Through these links and other interactive elements, VigLink allows MSN to instantly capitalize on previously untapped revenue.

“MSN’s partnership with VigLink speaks to the growing trend among savvy publishers who are looking to diversify from display and focus on commerce revenue” said Oliver Roup, CEO of VigLink. “We are proud to provide tools that help commerce editors unlock the purchase intent embedded in their content.”

“We prioritize innovation at MSN and look for ways to use it to enhance our users’ experiences,” said a spokesperson from Microsoft. “Our goal is to be an industry leader in digital advancements. We are thrilled to partner with VigLink to provide our users with a highly targeted, relevant experience while simultaneously providing our content partners with a new and significant source of monetization.”

Israeli Ad Tech Firm Spotad Scoops $3.5 Million in Series A Funding; Moves into China to Scale Its AI Technology for Mobile

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
Israeli Ad Tech Firm Spotad Scoops $3.5 Million in Series A Funding; Moves into China to Scale Its AI Technology for Mobile

Spotad, the leading mobile advertising technology provider, announced its recent acquisition of $3.5 million in Series A funding from Hong Kong-based VLTCM. The latest funding will allow the mobile ad tech firm to scale its self-learning AI technology using real-time Big Data into Chinese ad exchanges. In addition to expanding into China, the funding will be used to accelerate development in Japan, South Korea, and India, as well as to hire new developers and data scientists.

Spotad, founded in 2014, combines advertisers’ own marketing data and programmatic ad buying inventories with its proprietary machine learning systems to create DSP for buying any mobile ad space in real time. Combining Big Data, marketing data and machine learning capabilities into Spotad’s AI driven mobile ad tech platform allows advertisers and publishers to target a wide range of audiences. The AI-powered platform serves ads to users that offer a strong possibility of strengthening the bottom line, boosting your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

How Spotad’s AI for mobile advertising works?

Spotad is a mobile-centric advertising technology, running on a machine learning algorithm that automatically purchases programmatic ad media across different ad exchanges and platforms, including Baidu, Alibaba, Sina, and Weibo. The AI-driven algorithm places RTBs for ads that have the highest viewability chances, promising to deliver higher click-through and conversion rates compared to current industry benchmarks.

Spotad COO Yoav Oz identified Chinese market to test their AI technology owing to the linguistic and geographical challenges that the country offers. One of the biggest challenges, however, was in engineering the solution.

“Because we are one of the first Western DSPs to enter China, it is hard to translate the Chinese APIs into English,” Oz said. “It was also difficult to communicate with the Chinese developers, so we eventually found a Chinese technical translator for the API’s to overcome this issue. We then started to run campaigns with Western brands, and when everything worked perfectly, we started hiring local Chinese staff and engaged local advertisers. Today, we are the only Western DSP that connects to all the big exchanges in China with a local office there, where all the employees, besides the General Manager, are Chinese.”

Spotad is focusing its technology solution on improving ad quality on mobile devices, considering it is the most personal screen device we use today. COO Oz believes that ad tech stack should balance consumer needs in a programmatic buying environment, where automation sometimes de-emphasizes creativity.

COO Oz further adds, “In the programmatic world, using internal data sources and unique technologies developed by Spotad enables us to automate the media-buying process (we don’t have any media buyers on staff) and put an emphasis on using data in order to build high-quality models and buying strategies relevant to each brand. When the buying process is completely automated, it actually enables many new creative data options.”

Why is Chinese market favorite among AI technology startups?

According to a report by IDC in February 2016, 117.3 million smartphones landed in China in the Q4 2015, an increase of 8% from the previous year. Mobile marketing in China is expanding faster than anywhere else in the world. Compared to developed nations, China offers readily available testing ground for marketers and advertisers to verify the efficacy of new technologies, especially AI and machine learning marketing tools.

While Chinese e-commerce and B2B landscape may still be a complex challenge to tackle, Spotad’s latest acquisition will allow the firm to sneak valuable insight from China’s booming digital market.

Choozle’s CTR/CPA Strategy Roadmap

By
Avinash Duduskar
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0
Choozle Digital Ad Guide

Choozle recently put together an infographic that is simple and easy to follow so that anyone looking to create a digital campaign can follow a few steps and determine what their best course of action should be.

The graphic starts with defining a goal and takes you through a roadmap of steps to determine if the campaign should measure reach, click-through rate, or cost per acquisition- in order to prove ROI.

From there it defines what each of those campaigns means, gives a strategy tip and performance metric trip for each.
Choozle Digital Ad Guide

CallidusCloud and Salesforce Expand their Vision to Unify Sales and Marketing Automation

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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1
CallidusCloud and Salesforce Expand their Vision to Unify Sales and Marketing Automation

CallidusCloud®, best known for its cloud-based sales effectiveness and sales performance management software solutions, announced its decision to extend its partnership agreement with Salesforce. The new deal with leading marketing automation company will allow CallidusCloud to enhance its position in martech industry as a leading cloud-based customer experience solutions firm. The latest Salesforce Platinum ISV Partner will collaborate on new martech investments, joint sales activities and technical alignment, in addition to driving innovation for global customers.

“Every customer and everything is becoming smarter and more connected, which is why it’s more critical than ever to provide solutions that complete the customer journey from lead to close,” said Tyler Prince, executive vice president, worldwide alliances, and go-to-market innovation at Salesforce.

“Customers will benefit from our extended partnership, combining Salesforce’s #1 CRM with CallidusCloud’s leading Sales Performance Management capabilities.”

CallidusCloud customers can now gain accelerated insights on time-to-revenue numbers and their impact on ROI by adding Salesforces’ CRM.

“We are excited to announce our new partnership with Salesforce,” said Leslie Stretch, President and CEO at CallidusCloud. “As the leader in SaaS Sales Performance Management, this agreement is an opportunity to deliver solutions to a large, educated and cloud-savvy marketplace, complementing Salesforce’s CRM, industry, and Quote-to-Cash initiatives.”

Leading enterprises are growing their stacks for marketing and sales to drive maximum ROI from their investments. However, marketers and sales professionals have limited options to align every sales and marketing efforts through a single, centralized automation platform.

In its report titled “2016 Sales and Marketing Sentiment Study”, CallidusCloud revealed that only 30% of the sales and marketing pros said their companies shared data fully between sales and marketing. Only about 28% of them said they were using a unified sales and marketing solution; about the same percentage had one or both departments still depending on manual processes or spreadsheets.

via CallidusCloud
via CallidusCloud
via CallidusCloud
via CallidusCloud

Salesforce’s CRM and CallidusCloud’s Sales Performance Management and Sales Enablement Solutions will enable marketing and sales teams to close the blind spots seen in the journey of a lead from generation to fulfillment (or drop-off). These blind spots have always been a bone of contention for enterprises, fueling antagonism between the two revenue-churning departments. Martech solutions from Salesforce and CallidusCloud will help customers converge their resources through a single automation platform to boost ROI at an unprecedented pace.

CallidusCloud, founded in 1996, is among the leading martech solution firms that have run successfully as an IPO. It has so far made ten acquisitions in the technology sector, mostly focusing on building next-gen sales success platforms. By partnering CallidusCloud, Salesforce may fasten its efforts to acquire more companies in the near future, pushing its inventiveness to raise an IPO by 2017-end.

NetBase Brings Natural Language Processing to Social Media Monitoring; Launches “Instant Search” Solution for On-Demand Social Analytics

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0
NetBase Brings Natural Language Processing to Social Media Monitoring; Launches "Instant Search" Solution for On-Demand Social Analytics

According to a market research report, natural language processing market size is estimated to grow from $7.63 billion in 2016 to $16.07 billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.1%. Social media monitoring segment is expected to be among the top investors in natural processing market. NetBase, by introducing natural language processing for social monitoring, reveals how this cognitive technology adds power and balance to existing martech stacks.

NetBase, the leading provider of social media intelligence and enterprise customer analytics solutions, unveiled the ingeniously built on-demand search bar – NetBase Instant Search. The latest addition to social analytics suite from NetBase will enable users to view, analyze and derive insights from billions of social posts via the on-demand search bar. NetBase Instant Search will be available as a standalone or complimentary capability social analytics engine with natural language processing capabilities.

“By quickly identifying trends, post volume, impressions and changing net sentiment, NetBase Instant Search answers the questions marketers want to know now—who is talking, what are people talking about and where are these influential conversations taking place?” said Paige Leidig, CMO at Netbase. “This immediate insight delivers the background executives, brand marketers and analysts need to build and strengthen strategic marketing initiatives.”

NetBase is ranked as Top Rated Social Media Management Tool by TrustRadius 2015. Currently, NetBase offers unique social media intelligence suite that includes applications – Social Media Monitoring, Audience Insights, Voice of the Customer, and Natural Language Processing. Its best-in-class social media intelligence tools add value to any campaign brainstorming.

Benefits of Deploying Instant Search

  • Self-service analytics to empower social media campaigns
  • Real-time content discovery with up-to-second snapshot on social trends and influencers’ behavior
  • Instant identification of audience based on age, gender, geo-location, and device used
  • Hover-over analysis for enhanced social listening
  • Quick idea creation and brainstorming
  • Improved analytics on content performance
  • Zero interruptions in report generation and analytics, removing the need to depend on ad-hoc teams
  • Advanced filters to focus on enriching brand conversations based on source, domain, country, and languages
  • Real-time insights and analytics exported and shared across enterprise in PDF format

NetBase Instant Search pushes prompt and meaningful insights with a single click, eliminating the operational demand for ad-hoc report generation and analysis. Users can simply feed relevant keywords, mentions, and hashtags into Instant Search to derive a comprehensive list of data.

Every minute, social media users (individuals, groups, and communities) discuss various aspects of brands billions of times across social media sites. Marketers want to mine that data and determine what their audiences discuss. Natural language processing scoops significant part of the pie that users share on social platforms using text analytics, data mining and computational linguistics. Top brands are adopting social media intelligence tools to engage consumers across different channels. Adopting a search bar powered by natural language processing for social monitoring will allow marketers to equate brand’s social media engagement with powerful performance-based intelligence tools.

 

Maropost Adds an Intuitive Email Editor to Its Enterprise Marketing Cloud

By
Sudipto Ghosh
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0

Last time MarTech Series covered a news release about Maropost, I saw a lot of potential in this ingeniously built email automation platform. Living up to its promising spree of innovations, the company released a new user-friendly addition to its digital messaging and email solutions platform. The latest drag-and-drop intuitive email editor in Maropost Marketing Cloud offers seamless integration with existing email suites, allowing marketers to create highly interactive and intuitive campaigns using powerful functionalities.

“The Maropost Marketing Cloud exists to make our clients’ lives easier and to save them time and resources,” says Ross Andrew Paquette, CEO and Chairman of Maropost. “Our automation, journeys, and analytics are second-to-none. It only makes sense that we extend our expertise to the actual email creation process. Like everything we offer, the email editor has been completely designed and built in-house for maximum consistency and integration.”

Maropost Marketing Cloud offers a fully scalable enterprise email marketing platform for leading brands, online publishers, and digital marketers. The newly introduced intuitive email editor with drag-drop features is 100% compatible with the existing scripting language, offering intuitive personalization to engage audiences across regions. Users can directly access every style attribute available virtually through the interactive interface. From ideal designing to accurate placement of graphical content, the new email editor provides a fully responsive layout to create specific customizations. Using the new email editor, email marketers can automatically convert their email’s stylesheet into inline styles at any stage of designing. The level of customization allows marketers to target clients without relying on third-party CSS inline styling platforms.

“Our email editor has always been the foremost in terms of functionality,” says Paquette. “Now it’s also among the easiest and most intuitive to use. The new email editor will allow one person to accomplish in a fraction of the time what previously would have required a team of designers, coders, and email analysts and specialists.”

The Toronto-based email marketing automation provider offers diversified marketing solutions for mobile marketing, lead generation and nurturing, web tracking, landing page personalization and content optimization, app marketing, and API integrations. All its marketing solutions can be integrated with platforms offered by Netsuite, InfusionSoft, and Salesforce. For a company that believes in making in-house innovations rather than acquiring peer companies, marketers should expect more user-friendly additions to the Maropost Marketing Cloud in 2017.

In December 2016, Maropost raised an undisclosed private equity funding from Highland Capital Partners Europe and Elephant Partners.  Marketing technology innovations have received a major push with this new entrant making it big in marketing and sales cloud domain with cutting-edge innovations and upgrades.

Read Also: Maropost Sales Cloud Set for Release in CRM and B2B Commerce Markets

How Marketing Analytics and Data Science can Solve Civic Engagement for Cities

By
Apurva Kumar
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Its been a while since I was at Stanford, but it always feels great to be back on campus. We were recently invited to the Digital Cities Summit at Stanford University for a panel titled “Disruptors: Sensors, Real-time Data Analytics, Planning, and Optimization.” The panel was a great place to talk about the role of data analytics with respect to citizen participation and civic engagement.

The Digital Cities Summit at Stanford University brought together an elite group of ~200 global CEOs, SVPs, entrepreneurs, and policy makers. The goal of the conference was to illustrate how disruptive technology is changing the way citizens, government, and commercial organizations interact with each other to create new social contracts, business models, and behaviors in a digital urban environment.

Building “People Intelligence” for San Leandro

We are a young company but we are unique in that we work across both the private sector and the public sector. With this goal in mind, at LotaData we coined the term “People Intelligence” to provide analytics and insights about people to cities and local government. As an alternative data startup that provides “People Intelligence” for smart cities and local government, we combine data science, machine learning, and predictive analytics to help cities understand “why people are where they are and what is on their minds”.

As a company policy, for each new problem our company solves in the private sector, we take on a new challenge in the public sector. We strongly believe that the technology community should engage more in civic innovation. Social impact should not be an afterthought. If each company in the private sector were to set aside 5% of their time, energy, and resources for civic innovation, we could realize the vision of smarter cities much faster than by just relying on government.

We were selected from hundreds of startups to partner with the local cities: San Francisco, San Leandro, Oakland and Sacramento to evaluate their data initiatives and build analytics for their daily needs.

Our initial launch was with the city of San Leandro across the Bay. They are a relatively small city, but they organize over 5000 programs, classes, events, activities and festivals each year. 13% of the population actively participates. If you extrapolate this nationwide, we are looking at 20M programs across US cities and 50M participants with average revenue of $35 per resident, earned by cities. These are non-trivial numbers.

The problem is that cities do not have the tools to collect, analyze and visualize the data from these programs. There is an urgent need for data-driven optimization of city programs and facilities, community centers, libraries, senior centers, parks, pools, tennis courts, softball fields, soccer fields.

In the end, it is all about people, local communities, social impact, creating better living spaces. We need more analytics and insights to identify underserved neighborhoods, underserved demographics and increase engagement. We need a deeper understanding of how residents engage with cities so that we can then predict future engagement. Data analytics and machine learning is going to be pivotal for this.

The challenge then becomes about how to get private companies to participate in open data initiatives for the greater good of citizens and cities.

By definition, any data in the public domain needs to be open and accessible, as long as it does not infringe on privacy. Just last week, we were invited to present at the White House smart cities roundtable. The main focus of the event was open data standards and interoperability. The CTOs and CIOs from the top smart city programs, with the largest budgets, were in attendance.

The current administration seems to have done a decent job with opening up data. Most cities now have open data portals with APIs. But cities need more data from multiple sources to be truly agile and responsive to the needs of their citizens. This is where public-private partnerships are critical.

Ride share companies are a great example. While the relationship between cities and Uber may have been tense, services like Uber, Lyft, Didi, Ola Cabs, are an integral part of the city’s fabric. They are in effect the largest sensor network for detecting movement in cities. They gather immense amounts of data about riding habits and commute patterns.

Along the same lines, LotaData brings mobile location data from the private sector, from ad exchanges and programmatic networks, data about people density and people movement, for the benefit of cities. This data is of course anonymized.

Private companies are not required to share data with cities and local government, but in return for regulatory acceptance, private companies would be happy to open their data. Public-private partnership will only accelerate the vision for smart cities and benefit our citizens.

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