PMX Agency Taps Former iProspect Global Chief Client Officer, Jeff Johnson, as EVP
Jeff Johnson, as the New EVP at PMX Agency, Will Lead the Strategy and Cultivation of Omnichannel, Global Opportunities for Brands Served by the Digital Marketing Agency
Jeff Johnson, EVP, PMX Agency
A leading digital agency serving top brands, PMX Agency, has named Jeff Johnson as its Executive Vice President. In the role, Johnson will work closely with the agency’s Corporate Development and Marketing teams to help lead the strategy and cultivation of omnichannel, global opportunities for brands served by PMX.
At the time of this announcement, Chris Paradysz, co-CEO of PMX Agency, said, “I couldn’t be much more delighted that Jeff has joined us. His skills and approach are a great match for our ambitions and abilities. It is such a critical time for brands, regardless of industry. Staying prominent and relevant, and being part of customers’ lives takes experimentation, courage and a willingness to put growth, first. That’s the heart of PMX’s priorities and straight into Jeff’s passion.”
Having most recently acted as iProspect’s Global Chief Client Officer, Johnson brings deep expertise in the service and growth of enterprise brands and businesses at global scale. His experience and industry insight provide an edge to PMX Agency’s corporate vision, and to its unique performance and brand-based marketing programs that are built to tackle the most prevalent business challenges of today’s leading brands.
Jeff Johnson said, “We see tremendous opportunity for PMX Agency, and I’m thrilled to be joining this dynamic group of experts with such an incredible set of clients. With the landscape more complex than ever, PMX is focused on the critical need to close the gap between performance and brand marketing. Without each, emotional connection can’t be converted into tangible action.”
Throughout his career in the industry, Jeff has worked with the largest brands in the world. Prior to his role at iProspect as part of the global Dentsu Aegis Network, Johnson held roles including Managing Director and co-CEO of Covario, where he was involved in multiple acquisitions as well as the eventual acquisition of Covario by Dentsu Aegis. Before Covario, Jeff spent several years at iCrossing where he held numerous executive roles including Managing Director and SVP of Strategic Account Development.
Currently,PMX Agency leads with an insight-driven, consumer-centric approach to marketing. With a history steeped in performance and brand marketing, PMX Agency combines an intuitive knowledge of the customer experience with customized, scalable research and data-driven strategies across paid, earned and owned programs.
Voice of the Marketplace Solution Upgrades Application With New Reporting Capabilities, Improved Visualizations, User-Friendly Dashboard
Vennli, a leading voice of the marketplace solution, today announced the launch of the most recent set of upgrades to their advanced analytics and data visualization platform. Release 4.0 includes enhanced reporting capabilities, a suite of improved visualizations, and a new dashboard for a more powerful user experience.
Vennli Voice of the Marketplace SolutionPatti Doyle, CEO, Vennli
At the time of this announcement, CEO of Vennli, Patti Doyle said, “With Release 4.0, our customers will be able to visualize marketplace insights better than ever before. The upgrades to the platform provide a more meaningful user experience and a clearer sense of customer choice and brand perception.”
New Dynamic Vennli Dashboard to Capitalize on Real-Time Opportunities
The new Vennli dashboard now features three components:
the Performance Score
the Competitiveness Score
Priority Index
These at-a-glance-insights direct users exactly where they should focus on deeper insights and analysis using the vLens, Heat Map, and Metrics sections of the application. The two-pronged approach of delivering an easy-to-use platform to unearth business-drivers and key attributes from customers, along with the data analysis for actionable takeaways, Vennli enables businesses to accelerate growth by being different from competitors in ways important to customers.
All of these metrics are designed to give users a turnkey snapshot of their brand’s performance, both independently and as it relates to competitors.
vLens by VennliVennli HeatmapVennli Metrics
Upgrades to the cloud-based insight application are detailed below–
The platform’s Recon section has been divided into a new set of menus: Choice, Create and Collect. As a result, identifying customer choice and gathering results is now easier and more intuitive.
Metrics have moved into their own section. Beyond the richer visualization that has been incorporated into the app, users have significant flexibility on how they can review, filter and build segmentations with this information.
The Performance Score tells users how the market views their offering, while the Competitiveness Score brings in the competitive set and tells businesses how their offering performs versus the competition.
The Performance Score and Competitiveness Score have been brought together with a Priority Index in the new Vennli Dashboard that gives users an easily-accessible overview of their business.
Doyle added, “Our users are empowered to make informed decisions for their company using the powerful voice of the marketplace insights to drive differentiated marketing messaging and product strategies with the increased knowledge of how customers perceive their brand and its competitors.”
She said, “Vennli’s unique features and analytical insights deliver strong guidelines for where—and where not—a company should place its focus.”
Currently, Vennli delivers customer insights through the company’s cloud-based platform. Vennli’s approach to business intelligence uses a proprietary, proven competitive differentiation model within an advanced analytics and data visualization application.
InMobi Acquires AerServ for $90 Million to Create World's Largest Programmatic Video Platform for Mobile Publishers
Deliver Next-Generation Mediation Capabilities And Offer High Impact Mobile Video, At Scale, While Providing The Greatest Level Of Transparency & Control
InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile advertising platform, today announced the acquisition of AerServ for $90 million in cash and stock to create the industry’s first mediation platform with a unified programmatic auction for mobile in-app publishers. This acquisition will enhance monetization for publishers globally and further enhance the InMobi Exchange, a premium mobile programmatic platform.
Globally, mobile premium publishers seek greater control over advertising revenue and deeper transparency into both the buyer landscape and pricing than what supply-side platforms offer today. These publishers are looking to further scale their advertising revenue using a best-in-class programmatic exchange, which will bring header bidding into mobile in-app for the first time. Together, InMobi and AerServ’s technology will deliver a next-generation platform that goes beyond traditional ad mediation and provides high-quality brand demand, marking the industry’s first platform to deliver this combination to publishers worldwide.
On the demand side, brand advertisers are in need of transparent programmatic platforms of high-quality ad inventory that can be independently verified. It is expected that two-thirds of the world’s digital display advertising will be traded programmatically by 2019 and advertising sold programmatically will increase from US $57.5 billion to US $84.9 billionover the next two years, growing at an average rate of 21 percent a year.
Together, InMobi and AerServ boast over 90 percent viewability and over 70 percent video completion rate, more than double the industry benchmark for mobile – helping better meet the demands of today’s brand advertisers when it comes to programmatic spend.
AerServ has integrations with over 75 DSP’s, exchanges and agencies around the world, enhancing InMobi’s global footprint and together cover a large majority of the Fortune 500 brand buyers.
With this investment, InMobi’s video and programmatic business will account for 35 percent of the overall company revenue and will solidify InMobi’s leadership position in the mobile video advertising industry in the U.S. InMobi Exchange scale will increase as AerServ runs more than 90 billion ad opportunities each month and provides access to brand programmatic demand to over 2,000 mobile apps.
Abhay Singhal
“This acquisition fits in perfectly with our global strategy to bring best-in-class technology for premium publishers and driving mobile programmatic video revenues to them. Our combined entities will double our headcount in the U.S. while establishing a product and tech hub for InMobi in Los Angeles, a hotspot of innovation for media and video content,” said Abhay Singhal, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at InMobi. “We are two profitable companies combining forces in North America and this will further cement our leadership position in video advertising, enabling us to continue investing heavily.”
“We’re excited to join forces with InMobi and grow the mobile advertising and programmatic industry together,” said Josh Speyer, Chief Executive Officer at AerServ. “Our decision to embark on this new adventure was made easy by the great partner we have in InMobi, their expertise in the industry and global scale. This will allow us to scale our platforms together across the globe and build a strong business in previously untapped markets such as China and broader APAC.”
InMobi is a global mobile advertising platform that specializes in delivering the best ROI for mobile marketers. A mobile-first and mobile-only platform, InMobi has been pioneering the next generation of ad experiences, including video advertising, on the back of deep learning based optimization engines. InMobi’s platform help brands, performance marketers and app publishers engage mobile users across different stages of their lifecycle, converting each mobile moment into an opportunity to drive engagement and revenue.
AerServ is the leading inventory and audience monetization technology for mobile publishers. AerServ helps thousands of mobile publishers increase revenue through AerServ’s ad mediation platform, and increase yield by delivering brand-based ads from the aerMarket ad exchange.
The tragedy of the salesman Shelley “The Machine” Levene, the sympathetic figure played by Jack Lemmon in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross has never been more relevant. In Mamet’s play-turned-movie, Shelly can’t close anymore and splits his time between excuse-making and complaining until, through a combination of his desperation and boss’s cruelty, he is left hopeless in a shameful interview with the detective investigating his role in stealing the Glengarry leads.
Twenty years ago, CEOs salivated at the notion that the Internet might enable them to fire their expensive field sales force. Today, their customers and prospects are doing it for them. Instead of embracing the change, however, today’s executives are pulling out their hair, desperate for their prospects to talk with their sales teams again. Marketing organizations have become discouraged SPAM jockeys, putting more and more emphasis on email campaigns designed to attract MQL’s or SQL’s, 99% of which never amount to anything. Sales teams are in agony because their customers won’t talk to them anymore. Worst of all, the buyers are frustrated because their potential suppliers refuse to support them in the ways they prefer.
If you’re a sales or marketing leader, ask your veteran sellers if their job is harder now. Nine out of ten will say yes, and the simple reason is their prospects don’t need them like they used to.
Changing buyer behavior requires a shift in thinking
Most salespeople today are disenfranchised, but it’s not their fault: the problem is their executive management doesn’t understand how their customers evaluate and buy today. Buyers prefer to spend their time online rather than directly engaged with salespeople. Many of today’s experienced, valuable, and expensive salespeople should be brought into the digital marketing fold where their specific expertise can be tapped. Sadly, until CEO’s reallocate resources towards digital, more and more sales teams will be disenfranchised, doubting their value, in the gloaming of old-school sales models.
At Forrester Research’s B2B Marketing show in Austin, TX, Forrester analyst Mary Shea put it more bluntly: “The sales process no longer exists.” Why? Because what matters now is the prospect’s buying process. Laura Ramos reminds us that it’s all about empathy. “Mindset change starts with empathy,” she said. Steve Casey, however, explains why doing that has become so difficult for sales teams. “Your prospects,” he tells us, “don’t want to talk to you.”
It’s pretty hard for salespeople to express that empathy Laura Ramos teaches is so important when their buyers won’t talk to them. This is today’s huge opportunity for B2B marketers: to pick up where sales teams get shut out. Marketers can reach those same buyers to create meaningful, digital conversations in similar ways B2B salespeople once did.
Because of the ways buyers now evaluate solutions – they use the Internet for business evaluations the same way we all do in our daily lives to research for personal purchases – marketers can now take over where salespeople are getting shut out. It’s been 25 years since Peppers and Rogers wrote The One to One Future. That notion became reality in the B2C world early this century; it’s reality now in B2B as well. The buyers already know it… they won’t engage with companies who don’t communicate with them digitally using ultra-tailored, personalized, meaningful content. Unfortunately, however, many CEO’s who want to sell to them don’t fully get it. The B2B companies who recognize this and respect how their buyers want to buy have a chance to run away from the pack. There’s been a winner take all finish in B2C online selling, and it’s critical that B2B companies, as a result, marketers organizations have become the engine that leading B2B companies are relying on to snatch the lead in the digital race.
Putting marketing first also helps the sales teams. At the Forrester show, Cate Gutowski of GE Digital said, “Our sales team wants to build trusted relationships with sellers, so together we can change the world.” Because of the work, GE is doing with digital, their sales teams have a chance to do that. When the information is digitized and made available to buyers on their teams, sales teams have the high-value conversations that are fruitful for both sides.
An idle salesperson is a broken dream. Salespeople’s self-esteem — as competitors, as artists, as advisors — is based on engaging with their clients in a way that makes a meaningful impact. Unfortunately, there’s a crisis in the world of B2B selling today and many companies aren’t as enlightened as GE. Until companies reorganize their sales and marketing teams, we’re going to be seeing more Shelley Levenes.
SteelHouse Advertising Suite Now Targets Connected TV Audience for Omnichannel Brands
Advertisers Using SteelHouse Can Now Easily Reach Rapidly Growing CTV Audiences From the Same Platform as Digital Retargeting, Branding, and Prospecting Campaigns
Leading AI-powered advertising suite provider, SteelHouse has announced that it is expanding its advertising capabilities to address the rapidly growing Connected TV (CTV) audience. According to a recent report, the Connected TV audience is predicted to reach over 195 million US viewers this year, or more than 60% of the US.
New Addition to SteelHouse Advertising Suite Makes Omnichannel Advertising Easier
Mark Douglas, CEO at SteelHouse
At the time of this announcement, Mark Douglas, president and CEO of SteelHouse, said, “Advertisers don’t understand the scale of this change or they think we’re talking about the future. We’re not. It’s already here and every month more than 400,000 people disconnect their cable in favor of Connected TV—that’s an audience the same size as the population of Miami being added every month. And, with this addition to the SteelHouse offering, it’s never been easier for brands to execute and measure their omnichannel advertising, which can now include television.”
Connected TV within the SteelHouse Advertising Suite allows viewers to stream from premium content creators including all major TV networks, as well as many cable and digital content creators like Bravo, Twitch, or Crackle. The ad-supported programming is viewed through apps for smart TVs, desktop, mobile, or over-the-top (OTT) devices, including Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, as well as many gaming consoles. This allows cord cutters and streamers to replace or supplement their traditional cable bundle.
The Rise of Ad-Supported Connected TV: An Enviable Proposition for Brands
In an earlier chat with us at the MarTech Interview Series, SteelHouse CMO, David Simon, had said, “Marketers should also be able to focus on what they do best: marketing. You don’t have to know how your iPhone works to use it, so why do marketers need to know all the formats and features that fill their day? They shouldn’t have to be technicians, needing to solve all tech specs associated with video ads. SteelHouse is part of that change. Some platforms require video ads in very specific file formats and our system takes care of all that.”
The time spent watching traditional television has been on the decline since 2011 across all age groups, not just teens and millennials (down 45% and 32% respectively). Generation X has seen a 15.8% decline over a five-year period. This decline across all age groups is accelerating, while time with digital video devices is up 460% in that same time period. In fact, 47% of adults 22 to 45 years old are watching absolutely no content on traditional TV platforms, according to a 2017 Ad Age study.
The rise of ad-supported Connected TV presents a real opportunity for brands, as it provides the impact of television with all the benefits of a digital medium. It’s more targeted, measurable, and affordable than traditional broadcast or cable because it eliminates the inefficiency of broadcast TV.
Plus, CTV ads actually get watched. Rather than bouncing around, viewers who watch TV on OTT platforms complete 98% of the video ads they’re served.
Currently, The SteelHouse Advertising Suite provides marketers with everything they need to build their own ads then launch retargeting and prospecting campaigns through the display, mobile, native, and social media. The cutting-edge advertising suite gives advertisers total transparency and complete control over their campaigns – all with the fastest go-live in the industry. SteelHouse has more than 700 customers including brands like Virgin America, TUMI, Staples, Beachbody, and others.
Sigstr Powers 52 Million Marketing Impressions Per Month, Grows Team by 87%
Sigstr Added Several Key Hires To Its Executive Team, Including CEO Bryan Wade, VP of Marketing Justin Keller, VP of Engineering Robert Harris and VP of Customer Success John Klein
Sigstr, a SaaS platform for employee email signature marketing, is pleased to announce significant growth in 2017, more than doubling their existing customer base, adding notable new customers such as AT&T, SendGrid, LA Galaxy, Shaw Industries, Yext and more. The Sigstr platform also powered over 625 million marketing impressions throughout the year. Their rapid customer expansion puts Sigstr on track to power well over 1 billion impressions in 2018.
Sigstr also introduced a stream of key partnerships and new product updates throughout 2017 — including integrations with Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle, and Salesforce. The product evolved to include Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Contact-Based Targeting Functionality, Sigstr ONE, Mac Desktop Agent, Campaign Scheduling, Threat Stack monitoring, and Who Clicked & Click Notifications — enabling customers to see impactful marketing results and improved ROI. In 2017, Sigstr customer Invoca achieved a 477 percent increase in pipeline generation from the previous year. Canvas increased webinar registrations by 48 percent in seven days. Herff Jones achieved a 300 percent ROI on its Sigstr investment from just one campaign.
In addition to growth in its customer base and platform, Sigstr also grew its team by 87 percent through 2017. The growth was most notably within the company’s Sales and Engineering functions. Furthermore, Sigstr added several key hires to its executive team, including CEO Bryan Wade, VP of Marketing Justin Keller, VP of Engineering Robert Harris and VP of Customer Success John Klein.
Bryan Wade
“The past year has seen monumental growth for not only our team and customer base, but the direction of our product roadmap,” said Sigstr CEO Bryan Wade. “As we head into 2018 with what I believe to be the strongest team we’ve ever had, I’m encouraged for what the additional product direction we’ll be rolling out throughout the year will mean for our customers and partners.”
Sigstr was also selected to join the ABM Leadership Alliance, joining the likes of Demandbase, Optimizely, Engagio, LookbookHQ and others to further educate B2B marketers how to develop and deploy a successful ABM strategy.
Jessica Fewless
“More and more, B2B marketers are realizing that traditional inbound tactics aren’t working and need to adopt new, account-based approaches” said Jessica Fewless, VP, ABM Strategy, Field & Partner Marketing at Demandbase. “The ABM Leadership Alliance is committed to helping B2B marketers develop the skills and tech stack they need to win. Sigstr’s ability to deliver hyper-targeted content through a massive, untapped channel makes them a perfect fit for the ABM Leadership Alliance.”
Swrve Partners With Segment to Bring Mobile Insight and New Communications Options to Multi-Channel Business
Swrve Adds Segment to Its Partner Community to Build Campaigns Across Multiple Channels Based on Data
Swrve, the leading customer interaction engine, has partnered with Segment, the infrastructure for customer data, to provide new levels of insight relating to consumer behavior on emerging platforms including native mobile and OTT digital media streaming. In addition, the partnership enables Swrve customers to build campaigns across multiple channels based on data from any of Segment’s data sources, including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Stripe.
At the time of this announcement, Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve, said, “We’re delighted to be partnering with Segment to bring the most comprehensive possible data to Swrve campaigns. Our customers have all agreed on one thing: great data makes for great interactions. That’s why we felt it was so important to ensure the Segment ecosystem was available to them – and that in turn data collected in Swrve was made available as widely as possible through the Segment platform.”
Swrve is committed to supporting enterprise organizations looking to build deeper and more profitable relationships with their customers in today’s multi-channel environment. That, in turn, requires personalized, optimized and targeted interactions and campaigns, delivered ‘in the moment’ and informed by data from multiple sources both inside and outside the business.
That’s where the integration with Segment comes in. Thanks to the huge variety of data from every customer touch point and internal function (such as CRM, inventory etc), these campaigns can be based on more insight than ever before. And in the same way, campaigns delivered via legacy channels can be created and targeted based on real-time information relating to mobile, OTT and other interactions collected by Swrve.
Peter Reinhardt, CEO at Segment, said, “The Segment platform centralizes data from all user touchpoints, removing the need for complex integrations and empowering the marketer using Swrve to make campaigns more relevant and impactful. Adding Swrve as a Segment Destination enables our customers to engage with their end users in personalized ways across platforms and devices”
Currently, Swrve’s next-generation customer interaction platform helps enterprises maximize engagement and monetization by empowering marketers to deliver bespoke mobile experiences to every customer.
Swrve also provides a comprehensive set of tools that include audience targeting, real-time segmentation, conversations, push notifications, in-app messaging, A/B testing, predictive models, real-time data orchestration, and rich analytics across all marketing channels.
Why You Should Be Paying More Attention to Your Holiday Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective facets of digital marketing, and yet it often remains overlooked. While it may not be very flashy or technologically impressive compared to other features of the internet, when leveraged correctly, email marketing can accomplish more than nearly any other online marketing technique.
This is especially true as the holiday season approaches. According to RJMetrics, 50-100 percent more ecommerce revenue is pulled in between Black Friday and Christmas when compared to shopping days throughout the rest of the year.
More people than ever are buying their gifts online, and the most powerful tool for reaching these customers is — you guessed it! — email. Not only is an email address a direct line of communication with a potential customer, it’s also more instant than a physical “snail mail” address. And as the holiday shopping season creeps earlier and earlier with each passing year, companies are taking advantage of this by planning their email marketing campaigns sooner.
Here are some tips and advice for building an effective email marketing strategy for the holiday season:
Cultivating a strong qualified list should be a year-round goal. When it comes to email marketing, it’s truly quality over quantity. Whether you have a couple hundred or several thousand subscriber emails on your email list, the most important thing is that there are engaged, motivated customers behind those addresses.
That’s why it’s crucial to fill your email list with high-quality subscribers who have willingly opted in to receive your communications. Anyone who consents to share an email address with your company is essentially inviting you to use it. And since the odds of converting an email subscriber into a customer are far greater than someone who simply stumbles upon your company website, you should definitely be putting those email addresses to use.
Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to create a strong qualified list, which is why you should be actively working on this throughout the year.
Keep an eye on your metrics.One of the best things about email marketing is that you can see what people do with the emails when you send them. You can see who opened your email (and who didn’t), what links they clicked on within the email, and how many times they opened the email, among other things.
These metrics are incredibly important for refining a seasonal email campaign. With metrics, you can do some A/B testing, or see how changing different aspects of your email impacts the metrics. For example, if your initial open rate is low, some email newsletter software will allow you to experiment with different catchy subject lines to see if they improve your open rates; or you can see if sending a biweekly email gets you more results than sending one monthly.
By monitoring your metrics over the course of your holiday email marketing campaign, you can evaluate what is doing well and what is not, and then course correct based on those observations.
Never miss out on an opportunity to offer an enticing deal. These days, big sale announcements and coupon code offerings make up a significant chunk of ecommerce email marketing messages. Why? Because they work. Everyone loves a good discount, which is why online retailers dole them out so frequently.
Sales, coupons, customer loyalty programs, and other “deals” influence consumer purchasing decisions raise average order totals, discourage shopping cart abandonment, and promote customer loyalty that results in repeat business. One of the most effective ways to disseminate these deals is through email marketing.
Naturally, the deepest discounts present themselves during the holiday season (especially around Black Friday/Cyber Monday), so standing out from the crowd at this time is key.
Set up marketing automation to hone in on specific segments. Email marketing automation allows you to automate some of your marketing tasks and ultimately provide a tailored experience to your customers based on their demographics or behavior. By setting up marketing automation for your email campaigns, you can send product recommendations, abandoned cart notifications, or even win back inactive subscribers with engaging content or enticing coupon codes. With the flurry of holiday sales activity, automation can help streamline your seasonal email marketing campaigns.
Consider outsourcing your email marketing efforts. Not every business has the resources to orchestrate an in-house holiday email marketing campaign, and that’s okay. If you don’t have a marketing team that can create and send regularly scheduled emails, you need to employ the services of an agency or another third party who can. Generally, with this kind of setup, you’ll be able to review and approve everything in your newsletters before they go out, so you can be sure it conforms with your company’s voice.
If you’re not doing much with your business’ email marketing strategy, now is the time to change that. Whether you’re trying to galvanize online sales or boost year-end engagement, email marketing can help you hit this holiday shopping season out of the ballpark.
[mnky_testimonial_slider slide_speed=”3″][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Marketing Intelligence tools that were supposed to deliver accessibility of data, such as business intelligence and dashboards, are not reaching far enough into organizations to make that data readily available to people who really need it.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]
Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to start a data intelligence company?
Before I was a Startup Entrepreneur I was a consultant at a global media group. My role was to analyse the data collected from marketing activities and come up with new ideas and business cases for my clients. I spent too many hours doing this, and I probably spent over 10,000 hours in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint building stories from data. I guess I could be considered an Excel master, but there were only so many problems I could work on in any given week. I became fascinated with technology and artificial intelligence. There was a trend to adopt Martech, but each tool we used seemed to add more overhead to our days rather than less. I dreamt of building a tool that made people’s lives easier from day one, and could allow people like me to scale their expertise.
How do you see the contemporary trends in data management and analytics influencing adoption of marketing intelligence tools?
There are two main themes that come up over and over in our experience working with the marketing community. Data and AI.
Data is the core ingredient. The way we think about it has evolved in terms of what it means for business. We bought into the promise of capturing everything, but now there is a sense of missed opportunities when that promise fails to be realized. Marketing Intelligence tools that were supposed to deliver accessibility of data, such as business intelligence and dashboards, are not reaching far enough into organizations to make that data readily available to people who really need it. The reality is, data is not much use by itself, and companies are realizing they need to go further in order to remain relevant in the future.
Data Storytelling is a growing alternative, that has seen a 3.3X increase in Google searches over the last 2 years. There seems to be this shift to re-humanize a lot of the marketing data systems that have slipped down a slope of complexity, acronyms and opacity with the evolution of digital. I believe that we’ve found ourselves in a place where we often just share data, optimise on things like CPM and CTR, and forget about the context, meaning, and the purpose of why we were doing it in the first place. Data Stories bring marketing performance, data, and insights back into the real world and help people make decisions that have a real impact on business objectives rather than wasting time on vanity metrics.
The second major trend is AI, where intelligent services are being adopted to process, analyze, predict, and provide an interface for us to access marketing information at scale. AI Martech can be confusing to users, and create skepticism, but there are some tried and tested use cases being rolled out in real-world scenarios. AI is giving marketers the chance to solve problems that were too laboring before, such as cleaning, harmonizing and analyzing data, and instead making it faster, more accurate, and it can learn over time to liberate us from these time-consuming and often mundane tasks.
This trend means that data scientists or analysts are doing less data wrestling, and getting to a place where they can use the data faster. This is enabling a different kind of data scientist, one that doesn’t need to know SQL, or deal with massive spreadsheets to come into teams and be effective with data. I personally hope analytics jump on this trend and hire replacements that bring deep communication experience to the role, instead of purely data processing expertise.
A less discussed trend that we also see emerging is around using Natural Language Generation (NLG) in data management. At Nugit we are focused on NLG as a core AI capability of our Data Storytelling Platform and I recently discussed this topic in more depth following research we conducted into our NLG capabilities. We see NLG as an opportunity to translate data from numbers into words in plain English, and tell stories. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest this form of data is effective at sharing information. Whether humans will trust AI to deliver these kinds of insights as a human is yet to be seen, however, Gartner has predicted that by 2019, natural-language generation will be a standard feature of 90% of modern BI and analytics platforms.
In 2018, what would be the biggest expectations from data analytics technologies?
It will be utilizing AI technology to process data from many different sources, to provide accurate, personalized information that goes beyond just Dashboards as we know them. Users will expect to receive information on their terms, in a format and frequency that suits them. They will want data platforms to answer natural business questions likes Google answers our search queries. People will also expect data sharing in their workflow, rather than as disparate Dashboards. This could mean within messaging, mobile, or in their current productivity tools.
How does Nugit’s data engine work with search, social and programmatic platforms? Tell us more about these integrations.
We’ve built our Data Storytelling Platform to integrate directly to 26 marketing tools. These include Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, DoubleClick Manager, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, and many other technologies that are used here in Asia.
We have worked hard to create an instant report experience, with time-to-value as our key performance metric. Once a user has added data, in a few clicks they will receive dozens of relevant Data Stories that bring out insights and opportunities.
The API allows us to update the data daily, and access additional information that can be used for insights such as image and video creative, benchmark information and historical data for higher quality insights.
How do B2B influencer marketing communities help in building and fortifying brand safe ecosystem for marketing tools?
Online communities are a great source of research for marketers to discover new innovations and assist in the discovery process. They allow smaller startups to present their solution in front of the target market, and reach those that can benefit and give feedback.
What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
There are lots of exciting companies that are solving persistent problems in new ways. Evie, an AI scheduling bot, is something we’re using a lot at Nugit. Evie makes meeting scheduling more efficient and reduces long email chains. Slack of course is enabling high-velocity communications. There is also Cake.hr and Recruitee.com that we use for backend efficiencies. It’s great to see them continuously improve each month.
What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We’ve seen a move away from Dashboards as the go-to-solution to measure marketing campaigns across multiple platforms. We’re seeing a trend to visualize data and use narratives to make sense of key insights. Marketing departments are running so many campaigns across so many different platforms, they’re struggling to make sense of their data and performance just by relying on Dashboards.
Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign?
We did a small campaign on Facebook that highlighted success stories of our customers. Instead of talking about our product and technology, we shared the impact Nugit had directly on our customer’s professional lives. It was driven by a hypothesis that the world is looking to re-humanize, and simplify from the huff and puff of data systems. This produced results about 4x per $ spend more than a pure product message. During the campaign, we tracked the cost per qualified lead. Later on, we looked at the conversion to trial user.
How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
It’s easy to avoid AI as experiments, and continue status quo, but I believe building a learning environment and capability for integrating AI is taking steps towards future-proofing your organization. There’s a valid concern for what it means to jobs and reinventing job descriptions, but the marketing industry has been constantly reinventing itself anyway, and it’s good at it. I believe that domain knowledge will be king and those with deep experience in a particular discipline, that have also embraced AI and intelligent tech, will be the people that get all the promotions and their businesses will see growth.
One word that best describes how you work.
Persistent
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Slack, Uber, Spotify, Apple TV, Nugit.
What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I block 16 hours per week out of my calendar for GSD (get-shit-done) on strategic tasks. I do this 4 weeks ahead to protect my time from reactive activities and meetings.
What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
‘Stories that Move Mountains’, and ‘Play Bigger’ are on my bedside table now. On the side I’m also reading a few poker books. I like to read hardcovers, and usually buy from the airport when I’m traveling. Other than books, I use Flipboard on my mobile, and have just started trying podcasts. If you know any goods ones I’d love some recommendations.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
When you’ve got a challenge or problem that you feel you can’t overcome, ask yourself, “What would an entrepreneur do?”. Looking at challenges through this lens puts me in a more resourceful frame of mind to think scrappy and creative, and usually solutions come.
Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Elon Musk. How he can manage a rocket company, electric cars, underground hyperloops and an AI lab amazes me. What does he use for productivity?
Thank you Dave! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.
Before starting Nugit, I’ve worked in senior marketing services positions in Australia and Asia Pacific in firms ranging from full-service digital, pure-play media agencies and specialist data agencies. My domain knowledge specialities are data analytics, business intelligence, search engine strategies, and digital media. I’m always keen to share my experiences and discuss ideas in our industry, so feel free to get in touch.
Nugit is driven by the desire to help people realise the possibilities of data, because decisions based on data, are simply better. We aim to get rid of complexity and make the data overload manageable for everyone. Through technology, Nugit transforms business data into decision-ready reports which are easy for people to understand and share. We simplify and humanise every aspect of the data experience to help people make data-driven insights easier to find, digest and act on.
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.
TimeTrade, Mad Mobile Partner to Offer An Integrated Solution For Optimized Customer Engagement
New Integration Gives Sales Reps Omni-Channel Appointments with Concierge Solution
TimeTrade, the leader in omni-channel intelligent appointment scheduling, and Mad Mobile, a recognized leader in Unified Commerce, announced an integrated solution for optimized customer engagement through the Mad Mobile Concierge Solution and TimeTrade’s industry-leading Appointments-as-a-Service platform.
Retail store associates can now use Mad Mobile’s leading Concierge Solution to access TimeTrade appointments with a calendar view of their daily tasks, enabling them to better manage their day on mobile devices. With this integration, store associates can directly view appointments made via TimeTrade from store websites, mobile devices, search engines, and social apps. The integrated solution also gives associates a direct view of customer-specific information.
Bruce Bennett
“We are excited to work with TimeTrade to leverage their industry-leading intelligent appointment scheduling platform as an additional source of value for our customers,” said Mad Mobile CEO Bruce Bennett. “TimeTrade’s ability to provide a high-quality flow of appointments, along with their direct reach to shoppers across multiple channels, personalizes the shopping experience at stores and increases sales.”
“Mad Mobile’s retail solution helps retailers by giving store associates the ability to combine functionality for clienteling, assisted selling, engagement, and productivity,” said TimeTrade SVP Cimarron Buser. “Engagement is deeper when shoppers get a ‘we’ve been expecting you’ welcome experience upon arrival at the store for their appointments, and the integrated TimeTrade-Mad Mobile solution enhances deep-dive information so the store associate can personalize the shopper experience and better serve customers.”
TimeTrade helps leading brands optimize engagement through all phases of the customer relationship. TimeTrade’s intelligent appointment scheduling (IAS) platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to improve meeting scheduling strategies through real-time customer insights and actions, producing better meetings and higher growth businesses, with TimeTrade customers outpacing their peers by nearly 3X.
Mad Mobile is transforming retail with mobile solutions that empower store associates to engage with customers, enhance the in-store shopping experience, and sell more.
Merkle Named First Agency Global Specialized Partner for Adobe Campaign
Merkle Enables Brands To Maximize Their Adobe Experience Cloud Investments By Creating Precisely Tailored Customer Experiences With Innate Precision
Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven performance marketing agency, announced that it has been awarded the Global Specialized Partner status for Adobe Campaign, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Merkle is the only agency with the Global Specialized Partner status for Adobe Campaign. It achieved this by adding Asia Pacific regional specialization to its existing specialized status in the Americas and European region.
Merkle performed multiple successful customer implementations, the requisite number of certifications, and the required volume of sales to realize Global Specialized Partner status for Adobe Campaign. As an Adobe Global Alliance Partner with an industry vertical approach and Specialized status for Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Analytics, Merkle enables brands to maximize their Adobe Experience Cloud investments by creating precisely tailored customer experiences with innate precision.
Since joining the Adobe Solution Partner program in 2015, Merkle has expanded its relationship to become an Adobe Global Alliance Solution Partner with the full range of platform capabilities across the world. Earlier this year, Merkle was named Adobe’s 2016 Emerging Partner of the Year for the Americas and for the EMEA North Region (United Kingdom, Ireland, Nordics, and Western Europe).
David Skinner
“With a long history and close relationship between Adobe and Merkle, we value our collaboration as a key factor in the success we help brands achieve,” said David Skinner, head of global alliances and partnerships for Merkle.
Merkle is a leading data-driven, technology-enabled, global performance marketing agency that specializes in the delivery of unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices. For more than 30 years, Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to maximize the value of their customer portfolios. In 2016, the agency joined the Dentsu Aegis Network.
Connect Partners Are Independent Software Vendors Who Have Built An Integration With Hubspot And Passed Certification
Ceros, the cloud-based interactive content creation platform, announced that it has joined HubSpot, a leading provider of inbound marketing and sales software, as a Connect Certified Partner. HubSpot works hand-in-hand with Connect Partners to help grow their business through co-marketing and business development campaigns to increase shared customers. Connect Partners are independent software vendors who have built an integration with HubSpot and passed certification.
With the Ceros integration, you can transform your HubSpot landing pages into interactive experiences that drive engagement, boost conversions and deliver valuable insights.
Inbound marketers can now capture information without the interruption of a traditional form fill. The integration enables users to eliminate the static landing page, gate content at any point (including a specific page, time, or scroll depth), and unlock additional content or set custom actions after any form submission. Additionally, the forms can be styled based on the goals and designs of each campaign – all without the need for developers.
“We’re very excited to have Ceros on as a Connect Partner. This integration will make it even easier for our customers to achieve their growth goals through interactive content that drives engagement and conversions,” said Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot.
HubSpot’s Connect Program is an ecosystem of valuable third-party integrations. Certified Partners comply with a set of requirements in addition to hitting set milestones for the number of installs and positive reviews from customers to receive the HubSpot stamp of approval.
Simon Berg
Ceros CEO and co-founder, Simon Berg, says, “We believe content should inspire your audience, not annoy them. That’s why we built an integration that challenges the paradigm of having a landing page with a form that gates your content. It’s a true game-changer for the entire inbound methodology.”
In 2012, the Ceros team set out to disrupt the world of content marketing—a world that shackled designers and suffocated content creators with subpar solutions that sucked all creativity out of the process. To truly inspire their customers with great interactive content, brands were forced to undertake custom development work that was complicated, time-consuming, and unscalable. Ceros was created to stop the insanity.
We spoke to Simon Wong, APAC Services Director, HubSpot to understand how their products help Sales and Marketing come together and how their Predictive Lead Scoring Model works.
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Tell us about your role at HubSpot and the team you handle?
I’m the Director of APAC Services and manage various teams, such as Onboarding, Customer Success, Partner Services, Recurring and Professional Services. I’m based in Singapore but work across various offices in Asia (Singapore, Australia, and Japan). The APAC Services organization is focused on the post-sale experience of our APAC based customers.
How much of a role does AI play in HubSpot’s inbound marketing tools?
Inbound marketing helps you attract customers with content designed to attract qualified prospects, convert them into leads and customers, and grow your business. Basically, Inbound is all about attracting customers with content that’s helpful, relevant and timely. It’s about warm connections, nurturing relationships and doing things in a more personal and friendly way.
In 2017, HubSpot acquired Kemvi, the company behind DeepGraph. By infusing more data, artificial intelligence and machine learning into the core foundation of our software, our customers are able to truly create hyper-personalized experiences at scale. For example helping with information about buyers, markets and products, helping salespeople understand the nuances of their customers’ behavior.
Which countries within APAC region are showing keen interest? Are there any specific requirements that you observed?
For us, we’ve seen an increase in conversations around AI, specifically around efficiency and scale, from marketers and sales professionals in Singapore, Australia, and India. We have to bear in mind that these conversations, from my perspective, are still quite narrow. They are mostly around topics such as chatbots, personal assistants or simple task-based programs.
How does HubSpot serve the sales executive in doing his job better?
We make it easier for salespeople to reach their prospects and close deals. For example, being able to schedule emails to go out at a specified date and time, or using machine learning to send emails to prospects when they are most likely to engage. Simple to use, elegantly designed software that provides relevant, rich and timely data, and allows collaboration with marketing teams. What’s not to like?
How much scope does the product offer to customize requirements based on their business?
At time of writing, customization is limited to branded templates. However, we do provide an open API and online developer resources for developers if they want to do further customizations.
What can SMEs stand to gain from HubSpot’s offering?
SME’s can easily manage inbound marketing and sales all on one platform – which makes the communication process between teams a lot smoother.
Tell us how HubSpot’s Predictive Lead Scoring feature works.
Predictive Lead Scoring is our automated lead scoring tool, available to our Enterprise customers.
It computes a model based on the users contacts that describes what attributes, which is available in the UI, lead to having a higher likelihood of closing. There are some general guidelines to keep in mind though, for example, you should be storing both engaged and unengaged contacts in Hubspot, you should be marking contacts as customers for at least 3 months, have at least 500 contacts marked as Customers and at least twice as many contacts marked as non-customers.
Our Predictive Lead Scoring has 2 models. The custom model (mentioned above) is based on actual users portal data, whilst the default model is based on cross-portal data and used when there is insufficient data.
How does HubSpot’s Sales and Marketing work together and share insights?
HubSpot Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are integrated with HubSpot CRM Free, the underlying database that powers both tools. This means that all your contacts, deals, company information and various task data is already accessible in both places.
With this closed-loop integration, you’re able to see the entire lifecycle of a visitor to a customer. Sales is able to track various online behaviors of their leads and marketing can better understand where their best leads come from.
How does the CRM help you design a journey specifically for customers in the ‘delight stage’? How different is the content they receive?
In 2018, we are adding a new product line called HubSpot Customer Hub. Together with HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot Sales Hub. It’s built on HubSpot CRM Free where businesses will be enabled to improve the entire end-to-end customer journey.
HubSpot Customer Hub addresses unique challenges companies face in the “delight stage” by making it easy for companies to understand, respond and grow through the success of their customers. Through features we’d expect from customer service tools (such as, customer inquiry management, live chat, ticket escalation, etc), companies can rally teams around the customer, allowing better conversations, driving deeper customer insights, and strengthening their customer relationships.
Big Block Taps Former Leo Burnett EVP Tom Flanagan
The Agency-Accelerator Is Quietly Playing A Big Role At CES 2018
Tom Flanagan, Content & Marketing Executive, Big Block
The creative services and media ventures company Big Block has announced that it has added former Leo Burnett EVP Tom Flanagan to its executive team. Flanagan will serve as Chief Content & Innovation Officer at Big Block.
Content Marketplace is a Global Match-Winner
At the time of this announcement, Tom Flanagan said, “I joined Big Block because of the dynamic marketplace of entrepreneurial services, entertainment capabilities and new ventures companies it possesses.”
“I look forward to leveraging Big Block’s truly unique assets to help provide valuable levels of access and connectivity to some of the world’s most ambitious brands. I view us as being more of an ‘agent’ for brands as opposed to being an ‘agency.’ This represents an important distinction and a move away from the antiquated and limiting agency of record model,” added Flanagan.
He and Big Block CEO Seven Volpone are tasked with aligning Big Block’s investments arm with its creative business services consisting of production, design, original-entertainment development, content strategy, and live-media capabilities.
Experience with Startups Would be Crucial in Leading Big Block’s Future Strategies
An industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience building startups, growing businesses and launching digital divisions of global companies, Tom Flanagan has consistently worked with many of the world’s leading brands, celebrities, athletes, and entertainers.
In music, he has worked with global artists, promoters, venues, and record labels. While at Leo Burnett he helped bring to life industry-defining campaigns for brands including Chobani, Samsung, Bacardi, Kellogg, Hallmark, P&G and more.
Big Block, which works with companies such as ESPN, Ford, and the NBA has been quietly expanding its foothold across multiple parts of the media ecosystem.
From strategic investments in TV4, the linear programming platform to Enterra, a leading AI company based in Princeton, to the establishment of an eSports practice with veteran pioneer and ESS founder, Ed Tomasi to executive production of two feature films in the last year- Big Block is reshaping what it means to use an agency.
The addition of Flanagan, an award-winning agency leader, and branded content pioneer, further strengthens Big Block’s content capabilities across eSports and multi-platform content.
“Tom is a world-class agency leader and proven entrepreneur who can bring massive projects to life,” added Volpone. “He’ll be instrumental in helping Big Block evolve beyond an agency to an accelerator of ideas, businesses and stories that capture and captivate today’s zeitgeist.”
The move comes amidst a massive transformation for the media industry with networks, platforms, agencies all converging, and the lines further blurring between traditional premium content and branded content. Just this morning, Viacom acquired the influencer marketing firm WHOSAY to help advertisers create more branded content.
Flanagan hasn’t just been talking about branded entertainment for decades, he has been driving it forward. While he has won almost every major award in advertising and marketing, he remains most interested in working with brands to help them innovate around people’s lifestyles, as opposed to innovating around products and services.
Big Block Offers Content Marketing Capabilities across Industries
Currently, Big Block offers creative services, apart from serving as a technology investor and IP accelerator that works with leading consumer, entertainment, and technology industry brands, including Under Armour, Ford Motors, ESPN, and Enterra Solutions.
The company produces all forms of visual content, original entertainment properties, live-entertainment experiences and media+tech IP. In addition, Big Block actively invests in companies and people in emerging technology, media, and lifestyle companies, including the most advanced AI.
By combining technology and active investments with creative, Big Block focuses on better activating engaged audiences around content and turning conversations into valuable experiences and transactions.
Return Path Releases New Performance Benchmarks for the Email Campaigns Marketers Use Most
2018 Email Marketing Lookbook Report Analyzes 600,000 Commercial Emails to Reveal Performance Data for 10 Common Email Campaign Types, Plus Best in Class Examples for Each
With an average ROI of $38 for every dollar spent, email is one of the top channels for marketers to connect with customers and build valuable relationships. This is according to the 2018 Email Marketing Lookbook, published by Return Path. In fact, 70 percent of consumers prefer email for brand communications. But it can be difficult for marketers to evaluate an email campaign’s performance objectively, as goals and expectations can vary for different types of email campaigns.
Currently, Return Path analyzes the world’s largest collection of email data to show businesses how to stay connected to their audiences and strengthen their customer engagement. We help mailbox providers around the world deliver great user experiences and build trust in the email by ensuring that wanted messages reach the inbox while spam doesn’t.
A new report from Return Path, the 2018 Email Marketing Lookbook, takes an in-depth look at 10 common email campaign types, including abandoned cart messages, newsletters, welcome emails, and more.
By analyzing data from more than 600 thousand unique commercial emails, this research provides key performance benchmarks for each campaign type. The report also includes analysis of best in class examples within each campaign type, to provide inspiration and guidance as marketers plan their email strategy for 2018.
Key Takeaways from the 2018 Email Marketing Lookbook
Following are a few of the report’s key takeaways–
Welcome messages are important for building new subscriber relationships, but struggle to reach the inbox. First impressions matter and welcome emails provide a great way for marketers to embrace new subscribers and set expectations for future communications.
But welcome campaigns also present some unique challenges, as they represent the first contact in a new relationship. As such, welcome messages had the lowest inbox placement rate (84 percent) and the highest complaint rate (0.62 percent) of any campaign type studied.
Post-purchase messages outperformed every other campaign type in this study. Also called transactional messages, post-purchase emails provide details of a completed purchase, including order confirmations, receipts, and shipping information.
Because these messages are expected by consumers and provide valuable information, they tend to have a high inbox placement rate (98 percent), a high read rate (44 percent), and a low deleted before reading rate (seven percent).
Promotional messages are the most common campaign type, but performance is relatively poor. Promotional emails, which highlight a particular product, service, sale, or event, accounted for more than 70 percent of all messages in this study.
However, performance for promotional messages did not stack up to other campaign types in this study, with a read rate of just 19 percent and deleted before reading rate of 12 percent. However, volume does come into play with promotional messages—because so many are sent, even the small percentage that are read provide plenty of opportunities to generate sales.
Methodology
Return Path conducted this study using global consumer network data consisting of more than 3,000 commercial senders, one million consumer panelists, and 600 thousand unique commercial email messages sent to Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL users between July 22 and November 29, 2017.
Diennea Launches EmailSuccess For Sending High Volumes Of Emails
Diennea, a Leading Digital Direct Marketing Technology Provider, Launched EmailSuccess, a Proprietary Software Solution for Sending High Volumes of Emails, up to 15 Millions per Day
Diennea, a company specialized in digital direct marketing technologies for over 20 years, recently launched EmailSuccess, a high-performance, on-premises MTA server solution that simplifies sending high volumes of emails and managing deliverability for companies.
The company launched its proprietary software solution at Mailcon. The event, which took place on Saturday, January 6 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, gathered more than 500 email marketers, entrepreneurs and tech leaders operating in the largest industries: financial services, healthcare, home and business services, travel and more.
Thanks to its twenty years of experience in email delivery solutions, Diennea can provide companies with the whole tech infrastructure for creating, managing and sending multi-channel campaigns. In the campaign management ecosystem, EmailSuccess is the driver of the entire process, as it handles one of the most critical aspects for a company, the inbox placement, i.e. the ability to deliver messages to the recipient’s inbox. The biggest Internet Service Providers are becoming increasingly strict and selective in order to protect recipients. For this reason, now more than ever it is vital to combine list building and campaign creation best practices with reliable and flexible tools for ensuring the highest email delivery rates.
“EmailSuccess has been developed with the aim of providing an intelligent and scalable server solution which guarantees full control over the configuration of each individual parameter; with EmailSuccess, individual sending rules can be set for each single ISP, and separate IP pools can be defined; moreover, the latest authentication technologies such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC can be implemented and supported,” explains Fabio Masini, Diennea CTO.
EmailSuccess can be installed quickly and easily and integrated with systems already in place. Thanks to its auto-tuning technology, EmailSuccess decreases the need to handle low-level technical aspects to a minimum; indeed, the system can automatically fine-tune deliverability parameters based upon answers it receives from Internet Service Providers.
Qumu Appoints New Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development
Enterprise Video Leader Adds Industry Veteran Chance Mason, Digital Media Pioneer, To Accelerate Revenue Growth And Drive New Customer Acquisition
Chance Mason
Qumu, a leader in enterprise video, announced the hiring of video delivery and new media innovator Chance Mason to lead worldwide sales and business development. As Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development, Mason will leverage his 15 years of sales and operational leadership experience in the video platform market to accelerate Qumu’s customer acquisition, maximize existing customer revenue growth, and expand Qumu’s partner network.
Vern Hanzlik
“Chance comes to Qumu with a tremendous amount of experience building and leading high-growth sales functions in the video platform industry,” said Vern Hanzlik, President and CEO of Qumu. “His passion for how video can transform enterprises and deep knowledge of the marketplace will enable us to expand our reach across the Americas, EMEA and APAC.”
Mason’s experience encompasses the enterprise video and new media industries, including eight years at Multicast Media Technologies and the most recent four years as an Executive Vice President at Haivision. Mason has held multiple executive-level sales roles in rapidly growing organizations, and has led numerous business development teams spanning the Americas, EMEA and APAC.
“I’m excited to help the team drive adoption of the Qumu platform not only within Global 2000 organizations, but within any organization where flawless execution of video is a priority,” noted Mason. “Qumu’s product vision, technology platform and customer support are by far the best in the industry, and I look forward to contributing to the company’s growth in 2018 and beyond.”
Qumu helps the world’s largest companies realize the value of putting video to work for their digital workforce. Organizations use Qumu software to create, manage and share video—live streaming and on demand—turning video into an always-on resource and connecting thousands of stakeholders across a single enterprise
When we spoke to Mahi de Silva, CEO of Botworx’ai, who predicted that marketers will undoubtedly see AI-assisted marketing go mainstream in 2018 with advanced machine learning being the key tool for success.
Mahi said, “What was once a foreign and Sci-Fi concept has become a very real and instrumental tool for many industries. While the capabilities of AI spans industries, marketers will see more effective AI-assisted marketing in 2018, powered by some real hardcore machine learning algorithms.”
Ads.txt and Fighting Fraud with New-age Transparency Standards
Oded Napchi, CMO HIRO Media
Oded Napchi, CMO, HIRO Media, said, “We expect fraud to be one of the biggest issues this year due to two important shifts: we anticipate more grappling investigations on the online patterns to expose fraudulent activities that happened within YouTube and Facebook and expect a larger focus on fraud arriving from advertising (whereas today the market focuses on traffic frauds).”
End of Arbitrage in 2018?
Oded said, “2018 will be the end of arbitrage. Yes, it is about time… ads.txt and SPO seem to be the final nail needed for closing the arbitrage world. Our concern is that the arbitrage companies will move to another shady activity in the advertising world.”
Amazon, Amazon, Amazon!
Oded added, “Last year, we expected the duopoly to extend. We didn’t expect it to be Amazon, but Jeff Bezos’ juggernaut emerged victorious. We expect this trend to continue also in 2018 as Amazon continues to grow its ad offerings, and perhaps a 4th player may thrust itself into the advertising aristocracy.”
Common Consensus on Blockchain Business in Existing Advertising Ecosystem
Gil Larsen, VP, Americas at Blis
Gil Larsen, VP, Americas at Blis, predicts that blockchain technology would be the most sought-after market for doing business in an accelerated mode. Gil said, “By enabling marketers to conduct transactions in a secure and transparent marketplace, blockchain has the potential to solve for many industry issues. With blockchain, the end-to-end processes of booking, buying, and placing digital ad space will be recorded and stored. And, because all these transactions would be available to the public and verified by common consensus, blockchain will help bring about greater transparency and end ad fraud. Integrating blockchain technology into our existing advertising ecosystems will take time.”
Legends versus Startups: Who will Win the Adoption Race
Gil added, “Larger players will take longer to adapt, and organizations from across the industry will need to come together and agree on a common set of standards. We’ll see more and more startups adopting the technology, and the IAB and other industry bodies will begin setting some key standards.”
Blockchain: A Transaction Ledger
Further, Gil said, “Within five years, the ad industry will transition into using blockchain as a transaction ledger. And within a decade, we’ll likely see it become a new industry standard. It’s time for brands and their tech partners to prepare.”
Convergence of Cutting-edge Technology for Marketing and Sales Teams
Brian FitzGerald, PandaDoc
Brian Fitzgerald of PandaDoc has interesting predictions on how cybersecurity, the blockchain, and AI/ML would converge in 2018 to bring better business results. PandaDoc is a Document Management Cloud Software that streamlines sales proposals, contracts and other documents with e-signatures, templates, analytics, CPQ, and CRM integrations. Brian predicts that the advances in cognitive and systems neurobiology will lead to bigger breakthroughs in AI.
Brian said, “AI technology will become more efficient and precise, leading to a broad spectrum of use cases for businesses both large and small. Chatbots will be at the forefront of this change. The way people access information will continue to shift away from text-based query to voice and visual-based queries.”
Analytics to Become Core Offering in Marketing and Sales Technology Stacks
According to Brian, “Analytics and automation will be the focus of sales and marketing departments across most industries. As software becomes easier to use and more cost-effective, more widespread adoption will occur.”
He adds, “There will be major consolidation in the sales enablement, marketing automation, and CRM spaces. There will be a rush of acquisitions, and poor performers will be pushed out of business.”
Adoption of Cybersecurity and Blockchain Technology
Brian thinks that security concerns will continue to be a thorn in the side of SaaS companies dealing with government and enterprise level organizations. He predicts, “Custom development departments within SaaS companies will grow, as CIOs are pushed to find tools to improve upon the inefficiencies and reduce overhead. Fewer and fewer accounts payable departments will be saying, “the check is in the mail,” as digital transitions become the industry standard.”
Brian added, “Advances in blockchain technology will make “smart contracts” the next big thing. However, much work is needed before widespread adoption.”
Implementing AI for Disruption-free Customer Experience
Peter Friedman, Chairman & CEO, LiveWorld
Peter Friedman, Chairman & CEO, LiveWorld, predicts, “Usage of voice assistants will continue to rise in 2018, leading brands to adopt another communication channel to remain connected with consumers throughout the customer journey. Voice assistants can enhance the customer experience by always being there for consumers, so expect marketers to explore ways to most effectively implement AI marketing campaigns without disrupting the customer experience.”
AI will Continue to Be a Hot Topic for Marketers in 2018
Peter attributes much of the marketing buzz to the proliferation of AI/ML technologies. He said, “AI will remain the industry buzzword for marketers in 2018. However, next year brands will capitalize on the power of chatbots and virtual assistants to remain present throughout the customer journey to better understand consumers and increase their purchasing decisions.”
Botworx’ai CEO, Mahi said, “The workhorse behind AI-assisted marketing will be chatbots, that will emerge as the key channel for customer engagement and far surpass email when it comes to targeting the millennial generation. This tactic of marketing has been dubbed conversational commerce, and it allows brands to use contextual data about their customers to interact with them the same way a salesperson would in a retail store; providing that interpersonal communication on a global scale. We are already seeing chatbot used by brands to engage customers via Facebook Messenger, Instagram and the like, and based on those results, we can expect to see more in the future.”
The Power of AI-driven Messaging Apps
“Marketers will raise expectations for establishing two-way marketing strategies next year. The ongoing dialogue with customers will empower brands to enhance the customer’s experience. Marketers will put more of an emphasis on messaging apps than social media to drive an ongoing dialogue in marketing campaigns next year.”
Advertisers Will Ask More Questions and Demand Transparency
Jeff Marshall, CEO, CrossInstall
Jeff Marshall, CEO, CrossInstall, predicts, “With advances in both programmatic and social data, advertisers will ask more questions about inventory, messages, and attribution. Achieving scale and quality for user acquisition will reign supreme, but advertisers and the industry as a whole will no longer tolerate the black boxes or fraud in the typical attribution and traffic buying processes.”
Genuine ROI from Tools that Promise Transparency
Jeff said, “Advertisers will route their budgets toward companies that promote transparency and genuine ROI will rise to the top. This will cause a shake-up among those vendors that let ad fraud slide.The industry will promote tools that really work and hold those companies accountable that built their businesses on the back of ad fraud. 2018 is the year that companies will have to atone for dishonesty as advertisers push them to answer the difficult questions.”
Striking a Relevant Conversation with Customers without Losing the Pitch
2017 was a phenomenal year for AI and chatbots in the marketing world. Though still in its infancy, AI/ML, blockchain, and virtual assistants are most likely to make the conversations more intuitive. All that businesses have to do is plug ad fraud by setting higher standards for transparency and brand safety in 2018. This is what makes 2018 so exciting, in that we will finally begin to see the fruits of this labor and a new age for AI and marketing.
CoinDesk Partners with Revcontent to Monetize 1000% Traffic Growth
Because of the Exclusive Partnership with CoinDesk, Revcontent Advertisers Are Able to Reach an Audience of over 12 Million Unique Visitors per Month
This past year, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency took the world by storm when the value grew by over 1200 percent in just one year.
As people scrambled to learn about this hot market, websites like CoinDeskprovided dedicated content to help teach people how to profit. CoinDesk is the leading digital media, events and information services company for the digital asset and blockchain technology community.
As the number of visitors to CoinDesk grew by over 1000 percent from 2016 to 2017, Jacob Donnelly, the director of marketing at CoinDesk, was looking for ways to generate revenue off of the traffic they were bringing in. CoinDesk looked to Revcontent for help. In late 2017, CoinDesk exclusively partnered with Revcontent to provide content recommendation and since have seen a dramatic impact on their revenue.
“We have actively been testing different partners for a native content unit for a while now and found that Revcontent has delivered 8x the RPM compared to other networks we have tried. Further, the team is available whenever there are questions. We’re excited to work with Revcontent in 2018 and look forward to growing with them,” said Donnelly.
Because of the exclusive partnership with CoinDesk, Revcontent advertisers are able to reach an audience of over 12 million unique visitors per month, a number that is sure to grow as the popularity of Bitcoin expands in 2018.
John Lemp, CEO and Founder of Revcontent, added, “Revcontent is thrilled to partner with CoinDesk to deliver content recommendation through the Revcontent network. When we decide what types of publishers we want to work with, we are looking for media partners like CoinDesk who are the leaders in their industry with extremely loyal followings. We look forward to helping CoinDesk capitalize on their growth as we enter the new year.”
Revcontent is the world’s largest content recommendation network, according to Quantcast, powering 250 billion content recommendations per month. Revcontent partners with the largest media brands in the world such as Newsweek, Fast Company, The Atlantic and more. Founded by John Lemp, Revcontent’s headquarters lies in Sarasota, Florida with global offices including London, San Diego, San Francisco, New York, Mumbai, Toronto, and more coming soon. Revcontent reaches 97% of US households, according to Quantcast, and has been featured in The Huffington Post, Fox News, and more.
Intema Solution Inc to Integrate Blockchain to its Predictive Marketing Products
The First Project Will Be A Coupon Solution That Incorporates This Blockchain Solution into eFlyerMaker, Intema’s Email Marketing Application
Intema Solutions Inc announced that it will launch a project to develop a Blockchain set of applications using its Artificial Intelligence and predictive marketing products. This will strengthen the company’s position in the marketing industry and open new avenues in complementary business lines.
The first project will be a coupon solution that incorporates this Blockchain solution into eFlyerMaker, Intema’s email marketing application. This Blockchain based platform will allow consumers to use a single coupon to redeem and exchange promotional discount from any participating brand both online and offline. This represents an evolutionary change to secure the way coupons are being used, distributed and redeemed in Canada.
By launching a cryptocoupon, Intema is attempting to transform the current coupon landscape into a crypto currency-based coupon system. This will create an open coupon ecosystem to give brands security and unprecedented freedom to consumers to redeem the coupon.
Intema’s cryptocoupon will be the official virtual coupons of the new system.
The power of the Blockchain provides a type of coupon security that has previously not been seen in the marketing world and has the power to disrupt the coupon industry. This includes personalized promotions, an area in which Intema has always supported clients with the email marketing platform eFlyerMaker and the Artificial Intelligence tool MatcherAnalytics. In addition, the company intends to completely integrate the Blockchain based cryptocoupon solution into eFlyerMaker. Such a system will make Intema the first company to enable zero copy and fraud of coupons, a huge concern for brands.
Sebastien Plourde
“Adding a Blockchain solution to our software portfolio will change the future our products because it opens new avenues to brands,” said Sebastien Plourde, CEO of eFlyerMaker and vice-president of Intema.
INTEMA’s mission is to integrate technologies to marketing. The company develops technologies for marketing and services related to predictive marketing, relationship marketing and database marketing. Since its inception, INTEMA has dedicated its efforts to deliver key solutions to the marketing industry.
