New Linqia Survey Uncovers Key Influencer Marketing Trends in 2018

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December 4, 2017

Makeup Geek Partners with Bamboo Commerce for Omni-Channel Cloud Platform

Makeup Geek, one of Inc. 500’s fastest growing companies in the United States, has selected Bamboo Commerce to manage its Omni-channel and operations. Makeup Geek has experienced exponential growth, resulting in appearances on the prestigious Inc. 500 list for three consecutive years. Marlena Stell, Makeup Geek’s founder, CEO and YouTube sensation, started her makeup empire with how-to videos and a personal line of Makeup Geek cosmetics that continues to lead the industry. The company has expanded its online offering with global sales and distribution as well as a wholesale market and pop-up stores in New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities.

Managing the order process, inventory and customers, as well as fulfillment and distribution across expanding consumer channels, have been key objectives to managing Makeup Geek’s expansion.

Also Read: Bamboo Commerce Completes Initial Capital Raise of $1 Million for Omnichannel Platform

“We’re retooling our operations to provide customers with a world-class experience. Our ability to service and support our shoppers, fans, and vendors, starts with our process and systems. The implementation of Bamboo Commerce provides us with a foundation for operations and a seamless set of integrations. It also opened up our options to evaluate, update and implement new third-party technologies based on the ease, speed and cost of new integrations. What previously took months to implement we can now do in days or weeks. We need that speed and agility in our marketplace to continue to grow,” Stell said.

“We are excited to announce that Makeup Geek selected Bamboo Commerce as its Omni-channel platform. Bamboo will play a significant role going forward due to the expansion of their online business and scaled operations. Our cloud platform will support day-to-day operations for inventory, orders and customer management as well as fulfillment, distribution and key reporting. We were also able to migrate eight years of inventory, orders and customer data in a little more than a month. We did this while integrating to a new e-commerce platform, which saved Makeup Geek months of technical time and effort. We look forward to their continued growth and expansion with Bamboo Commerce,” said Scott Robertson, Bamboo Commerce CEO and co-founder.

Recommended Read: How Marketing Ops Runs Marketing Like a Business

The Fight Against Fraud: Why DSPs Should Build Their Own Fraud-Detection Tools

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Jochen Schlosser

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December 4, 2017

The Fight Against Fraud: Why DSPs Should Build Their Own Fraud-Detection Tools

Our industry is plagued with fraud. Global industry bodies are now involved, with the IAB releasing Ads.txt guidelines and Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) developing focused programs. Many platforms rely on specialized third parties like Integral Ad Science (IAS), Forensiq, and others to keep the ecosystem safe. However, working predominantly with external partners carries risks and reduces control. One classic outsourcing rule states that business-critical processes shouldn’t be outsourced unless they’re a commodity. Is fraud detection a highly-standardized service? Clearly not.

One major risk stems from setups not featuring real-time detection and adaptation to fraudulent patterns. Real-time is not today’s standard. Even TheTradeDesk only just recently announced a real-time approach with an external partner, which indicates that some platforms still work in batches. It is clear that working with batched updates enables fraudsters to game your system:

As soon as information on batch update schedules is leaked or derived via testing, the bad guys can trick such a system by starting with a fresh set of cookies or a new set of IPs in perfect sync with the batch updates. Thus, the fraud is undetectable to the algorithm. As a result, all the hype around Machine Learning and AI don’t help if you are too slow.

Even if everything is updated and integrated into real-time, using third-party platforms and not investing in proprietary algorithms puts you at risk. Why? Specialized and widely spread fraud-detection approaches are attractive targets for fraudsters. If they attack such a player successfully, they hit a lot of birds with one stone as the solution was supposed to protect many systems simultaneously.

You only need access to the fraud classification service of the specialist provider, for instance by signing up as a paying client, et voilà: You’re capable of training your bots to go under the radar. Initially, your bots will be classified as fraud but only in “your” artificial environment. Then, in the next iterations you train, test, and learn until the bots are good enough. Then, they are released into the wild where the same detection mechanisms are used on big advertising platforms.

Also Read: 3 Rules for Communicating Post-Crisis, Cyber Attack 101

Thus, the bad guys reverse-engineer the detection algorithm and easily trick it. Tricking a solution only running proprietarily and integrated into a single DSP is less attractive than attacking a third-party solution used by many. Aiming at widely deployed third-party approaches scales better, generates more money, and is far easier. Attacking a proprietary solution can only be done by actually ingesting fraudulent traffic, buying significant traffic on the platform in order to see if it gets through the gates. The more information, services, and APIs on fraud prevention that are public, the easier it is for con artists to game the system.

Don’t believe the hype around pure AI and automated approaches. Fraud detection is a cooperative discipline. Any solution should combine AI / Machine Learning with business rules and human inspection. Domain-specific knowledge is critical to success. Many suspicious signals aren’t binary classifiable as fraud/non-fraud. Often suspicious traffic is still 100% legit and should not be cut-off. In some cases, the human experts need to make the final call.

Most notable, quality and diversity of data defines whether algorithms reach the necessary level of excellence. Rich data, derived from different sources, such as combining SSP / DSP bid request data with actual delivery data from the ad server, and even onsite engagement and conversion data, is more vital to success than re-tweaking algorithms. High-quality data and visibility into each step of the delivery chain is the ground truth that drives all those algorithms, it doesn’t matter if AI / ML or business rules are used, poor data will ruin your performance in all scenarios.

For me, it is obvious that all adtech platforms should have dedicated, cross-functional teams working on owned, proprietary algorithms for fraud detection. Additionally, human experts should constantly monitor suspicious traffic and do deeper, specialized analysis in ambiguous cases. Ultimately, all of this can and should run in sync with third-party solutions, especially if a client requires such a partner explicitly.

If someone sees this differently, what will you tell advertising clients if something goes seriously wrong: “Sorry, our partners messed up and we can’t give you details because we have no clue what they are doing?” Not an enviable position to be in…

Anvil Media Adds New Midwest Office to Meet Demand

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December 4, 2017

Anvil Media Adds New Midwest Office to Meet Demand

The Measurable Marketing Agency Anvil Media Sees 40 Percent Growth in 2017 Through Expanded Service Mix

Anvil Media, Inc, a measurable marketing agency specializing in paid and organic search engine and social media marketing services expects to end 2017 with over 40 percent year-over-year revenue growth, thanks in part to an expanded digital marketing service mix that addresses the ever-changing digital marketing landscape.

“With a seventeen-year history in the world of search engine marketing, we’ve seen major shifts in how brands and consumers engage. Over the past year, we’ve invested deeply in helping our clients leverage the boom in voice search and product-centric searches on Amazon,” stated Anvil Media President Kent Lewis.

Anvil formally launched a host of new and upgraded service offerings across the digital marketing mix. Below are five of the most unique and popular new services offered to Anvil clients.

Voice Search Optimization Strategy – With the rampant adoption of voice-activated searches across devices ranging from phones to Google Home and Amazon Alexa, there is an emerging opportunity to own a coveted position in search results, known as “Position 0.” Anvil’s new VSOS provides a foundational strategy to maximize your brand’s organic visibility in voice searches at Position 0.
Amazon Shopping Audit and Plan (ASAP) – With more than half of all product searches beginning on Amazon, manufacturers, and retailers must have a strategic presence on Amazon. Anvil has your back, from foundational product fulfillment and pricing strategy to organic product page optimization and Amazon Marketing Services campaign development and management.
Competitive Intelligence Audit (CIA) – Develop informed digital strategies for 2018, based on Anvil’s new comprehensive business intelligence audit of your competitors’ online presence. Our clients select the number of competitors and we take it from there.
Content Marketing Audit & Plan – Anvil views content as the driving force behind successful digital marketing. Although not unique in this view, we have developed a model by which content marketing efforts are fully integrated and amplified via our new CMAP offering. This service is ideal for start-ups or companies that lack a cohesive content strategy, particularly online.
Conversion Rate Optimization Audit and Plan (CROAP) – The last mile can make or break your ability to generate online leads or sales cost-effectively. Anvil can help maximize your conversion rates site-wide to leverage your existing site visitors, before turning on the gas and increasing traffic.

The expanded service mix was driven by Anvil’s new Executive Team, which includes three new members: Melanie Hughson, Director of Account Services, Erica Lewis, Operations Manager and Chrispin Kenney, Vice President. Chrispin is heading up Anvil’s first geographic expansion efforts and heads up the new Madison, WI office. To ensure consistent quality and delivery of service and results, Anvil also expanded its team headcount by more than 30 percent.

“I’m excited to head up our Midwest and East Coast office. I’ve been in the digital world since 1993 and when it came to choosing a brand to bring East, Anvil was my first choice. I’ve watched Anvil grow and evolve the past five years and felt the timing was perfect to partner,” stated Chrispin Kenney, Vice President.

Based on an in-depth analysis of the marketplace, Anvil expanded its industry vertical expertise beyond e-commerce, high-tech/software, higher education, hospitality, healthcare and financial services to include Automotive and senior care. Anvil also refreshed its Advisory Board for 2018, to ensure the company implements strategic initiatives and achieves its long-term goals.

Anvil’s efforts to build one of the best agencies in the country was rewarded. Anvil was one of ten agencies to receive ‘Best SEM Companies for September 2017’ from FindBestSEO among other awards and recognition in 2017. The recognition and marketing efforts have also helped fuel new business. In the past quarter, Anvil added the following companies to its client roster in the past two months: 3Degrees, BuildingBits, ESS, Grafletics, Health and Safety Institute, Polaris Footwear and Vesta. If you feel your company would benefit from increased awareness and sales, contact Anvil to be added to this exclusive client list.
With headquarters in Portland, OR and an office in Madison, WI, Anvil is an award-winning measurable marketing firm that creatively solves business problems for purpose-driven companies. Anvil specializes in providing analytics, search engine optimization, paid media and social media marketing services.

Delmondo and Uru Announce Partnership

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December 4, 2017

Delmondo and Uru Announce Partnership Bringing AI-powered Brand Safety Tools to Social and Digital Video Analytics

Partnership will Bring First-To Market Capabilities To Monitor Brand Safety, Prove Value Of Influencer Marketing Campaigns and Branded Integrations In Social Video, OTT and Digital Video Formats

Delmondo, a leading social video analytics and sponsorship reporting software and Uru, an AI and computer vision company that generates brand insights for digital video, announced that Delmondo will integrate Uru’s Brand Recognition and Brand Safety Artificial Intelligence technologies into its platform. The partnership will bring first-to market capabilities to monitor brand safety and prove the value of sponsorships and branded integrations present in social video, OTT and all other digital video formats.

Delmondo’s platform provides branded content sellers and marketers with advanced real-time social and live video analytics, and monetization metrics to value content.

With the integration of Uru’s Artificial Intelligence software, Delmondo customers will now have the capability to instantly identify:

What brand logos and names are shown inside a digital video or piece of social media
The size and quality of that exposure
Audiences exposed to branded content
Estimated media value for that placement

In addition, Delmondo will be able to inform users about the relative brand safety of those videos thanks to Uru’s first-to-market Brand Safety solution, which holistically scans a video in search of brand safety red flags such as profanities, negative sentiment, weapons and more.

Nick Cicero

“Our customers are already using Delmondo to provide greater transparency, accuracy and validation of their branded content and sponsorship activations with sports teams, influencers and media companies, but have been seeking a better solution to understand brand safety in social video. Uru’s Brand Safety solution is the first and only video brand safety solution that looks at all of a video’s data (audio and images) to compile a brand safety score, and we’re excited to be the first social video platform to integrate this into our offerings to improve our customer’s valuation of content and evaluation of branded content and sponsorship partners,” said Nick Cicero, Delmondo CEO and Founder.

This partnership comes at a time when brand safety of video advertising and ROI on content sponsorship are top of mind for every brand and media company shifting dollars from linear TV to digital, and when artificial intelligence represents one of the only ways to assess each at scale and in near real-time.

“Go to any media or marketing conference today and I promise you’ll hear about sponsored content and how to measure it. I promise, especially in the wake of what is still happening across large platforms, that you’ll also hear about brand safety of video. With our collaboration with Delmondo, we’re using bleeding edge, purpose-specific AI to tackle two of the biggest topics on the minds of media creators and CMOs today,” added Bill Marino, Uru CEO and Co-founder.

Delmondo is the leading cross-platform social video analytics and sponsorship ROI software company, measuring all content on social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, YouTube and YouTube Live, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, OTT and first-party video players. Delmondo Mercato is a sponsorship software that helps brands, agencies, media and entertainment companies, sports leagues and teams streamline their branded content and sponsorship process from research to reporting, maximizing revenue while increasing transparency around all content on social channels and first-party video players.

Advertisers and rights-holders alike can now automatically track detailed sponsorship metrics on social content, first-party video and OTT providers, including: brand appearances, mentions, brand safety score, total exposure time, average minute audience, engagements/second, and more with estimated media value, audiences reached and total digital audience delivery.

Nimble, PieSync Announce Contact Unification and Social Enrichment SaaS Apps

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December 4, 2017

Nimble, PieSync Announce Contact Unification and Social Enrichment for 90+ SaaS Apps

Nimble’s Signature Social Business Profiles, Contact Discovery Engine and Smart Segmentation Enhance the Value of 90 SaaS Applications

Nimble, the leading social sales and marketing contact relationship platform, today announced in-the-box integration with PieSync. The B2B cloud integration platform extends Nimble’s social business profiles, contact data discovery engine, and smart segmentation to more than 90 SaaS applications, including G Suite, MailChimp, Hubspot, Salesforce, and Quickbooks.

Based on the premise that virtually all customer-facing teams and individuals need an easy-to-use, intelligent contact relationship manager to help build productive and successful relationships, Nimble unifies contact data from multiple contact management systems, social platforms and SaaS sales, CRM, marketing automation, customer service and accounting applications into a single system of record.

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara said,“Today, people struggle to manage critical business contacts because contact management and CRM are broken. Contact details and engagement history are strewn haphazardly across stacks of scribbled-on business cards, multiple email accounts, outdated email contact lists, fragmented social media streams, and siloed business applications. Employees waste time and inevitably miss sales opportunities. With Nimble, you spend more time cultivating the right relationships using a highly targeted list of prospects, leads and customers tracked in disparate systems.”

Also Read: MCH Strategic Data Partners with Marketo to Simplify Data-Driven Marketing

Nimble delivers a company-wide relationship management platform

Nimble can either be used as a stand-alone CRM or enhance the value of existing contact management, marketing automation, sales CRM and accounting applications. Specifically:

When syncing Google Contacts, Nimble becomes a robust team contact manager that tracks email communications. AI-enabled email signature capture helps keep G Suite contact details clean and up-to-date in near real-time.
Email Marketing Automation Apps – A Nimble integration with MailChimp or Campaign Monitor enables users to manage subscription status for email audiences in multiple email lists. Users can also bring segments of Nimble contacts into specific mailing campaigns; discover contact details for bounced emails; and assign follow-up tasks based on signups, survey responses, and average email opens or click rates.
Marketing Automation Platforms – A Nimble integration with Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot or Infusionsoft enables users to translate a combination of marketing attributes such as lead scores, website visitor activities and form submissions into actionable Nimble tabs you can use to create daily call lists and follow-up tasks using Nimble’s signature social business fields.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – Using Nimble within Salesforce or Dynamics 365 helps sales professionals engage more effectively with customers and prospects. Use Nimble’s Smart Profile Insights to reveal common interests, preferred communication channels, and missing contact details.
Accounting Platforms – Integrating Nimble with Quickbooks or Xero unlocks knowledge in accounting systems that enables sales and support teams to interact with customers facing financial issues such as past due to invoices, without having to open a separate bookkeeping application or re-enter data.

Also Read: Nimble’s Contact Manager Integrates With Office 365, G-Suite and 80+ Cloud Apps

What customers have to say

“Nimble is the best prospecting tool I’ve ever used. It builds profiles instantly so I immediately know who a person is, what interests him or her, and how to best to reach out, within context. Nimble is especially useful when working in Zoho CRM because it adds social profiles instantly to Zoho contacts and provides missing contact details,” said Michael McKenna, principal consultant at Dublin-based cloud applications consultancy SmartCloud.

Martin Brossman, executive and business success sales coach, Martin Brossman and Associates, added, “As a real-world small business owner, it’s difficult to deliver the ‘personal touch’ when all my prospects, allies and customers are tied up in different business apps, including Constant Contact, Quickbooks, Gmail, Calendar and social media. Fortunately, Nimble and PieSync bring all these systems together into a single system of record that makes it easy for me to cultivate the one-on-one relationships that grow my business and my customers’ businesses.”

Recommended Read: Pageflex Releases Eagerly Anticipated Storefront 9

Making the Holiday Season Work for Your Video Business

By

Mantonie Byrd

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December 4, 2017

Making the Holiday Season Work for Your Video Business

The end of the year brings many things: movie premiers, shopping and overeating (all the important things, right?). For media companies, it is serving up online video, to capture that much-needed ad-revenue and traffic. These premium CPMs help fulfill revenue goals and campaign guarantees, so it’s vital that media companies take full advantage of the opportunity.

According to Ezoic’s ad revenue index, the fourth quarter (specifically November & December), garners the highest online ad rates of the year. IRIS.TV’s historical data also shows that our clients experience the highest view volumes at the end of the year (1.8M streams per client in Q4 vs. 1.3M streams per client in all other quarters). These two recurring trends create a unique challenge for both our clients & the digital media space in general: How do we take advantage of this audience, not only right now, but into the new year and beyond?

We’ve put together our best practices for high-volume user consumption, engagement, and retention.

There are 12 Days of Christmas, but here are 5 things to do right now

Organize Your Content: Create categories that prepare you for the expected & unexpected this season

Whether you celebrate or not, the season lends itself to countless opportunities to highlight holidays. As everyone knows, creating holiday or seasonal content is a great way to engage viewers during this time of year. Viewers are inherently more inclined to not only click on seasonal content, but to keep watching that content.

It’s also important to create categories surrounding this content. Whether using an AI programming engine (like IRIS.TV) or creating manual playlists for the holiday, viewers respond well to an experience that flows logically from asset to asset. With an engaged user and premium CPMs, this strategy becomes even more important during this season. .

Here are some examples of how to create a premium seasonal experiences for users based on your L.E.N.S. (lifestyle, entertainment, news, sports) of content.

Lifestyle – IRIS.TV Lifestyle clients find the most success with how-to videos that surround holiday food. On average they have lower bounce rates than other how-to videos (decorating, costumes, arts & crafts, etc.). Create holiday-specific categories that surround this content. When users begin an experience on one of these assets, they will be served content that has the highest engagement for this time of year.
Entertainment – Create ‘Year in Review’ or ‘Top 10 in 2017’ videos or listicles ahead of time. In periods of slow entertainment/celebrity news, these clips are topical for the season, and keep viewers engaged between news cycles.
News – Election coverage drove the majority of traffic this time last year, but news publishers can’t rely on that type of news cycle every year. Take advantage of holiday content that performs well on other verticals – showcase holiday recipe tips or present a ‘Year in Review’ for top news stories of the year. This is an excellent opportunity to re-edit and use content that was produced over the last 12 months.
Sports – In-game highlight videos have the lowest bounce rates across all sports content, and audiences love watching top plays. Create ‘pre-game’ playlists or categories ahead of major events (football games for example) that showcase performances and results from the same event in years past. Replace these streams with new highlights as soon as they are available.

Evergreen isn’t Just a Tree Outside: Use last year’s seasonal content to bolster your original content library

What a lot of publishers forget, and what our most successful clients take advantage of, is the evergreen nature of most holiday content – last year’s Christmas recipe or decoration video is almost definitely still relevant. While you might not have the capacity to shoot all new holiday content, some timely edits will give your older assets a contemporary feel. Pairing those with the new content you can produce will give visitors a sizeable content library to consume. On top of that, reusing your own assets will generate higher CPMs than syndicating in seasonal content.

Also Read: Marketers: Here’s How to Evaluate Your Campaigns Heading into the Holiday Season

No Matter What Vertical, Create ‘Year in Review’ Content: It will be key when your offices are empty or the news cycle is slow

This is important enough to be repeated. If there’s anything that pubs like Buzzfeed & Business Insider have taught us, it’s that audiences will re-consume if there’s added value. They’ve probably already seen what you’re about to show them, but you can bet they want to know what the experts say is the most important or best content to remember into next year. Almost equally valuable is that these articles or videos can be prepared ahead of time, allowing production before teams leave for vacation

Look Back at What Drove Growth or Engagement Last Year: Use that data to shape your strategy

Using IRIS Vision, or whichever analytics platform you prefer, generate a report from Q4 of last year (or for several years if you have data for them). In conjunction, use the preceding several months of data as a benchmark for 2017 trends. Using both asset and category level data, you can begin to understand what type of content resonated in the holidays last year, and compare that to other facets of 2017 content that perform well (think asset length, specific delivery methods, text on screen vs. voiceover). Together, those analyses will put you in a great position to create the most engaging content for holiday 2017.

Using a specific example from IRIS Vision, one particular client saw that the highest volume of video views in Q4 2016 came from ‘holiday’, ‘thanksgiving’, ‘Christmas’, etc. categories. They also found that the highest initial view assets during that period were ‘how-to’ videos about the holidays. When looking at bounce rates, the highest bounce rate asset was a 3:00 minute long video ‘How to Light a Christmas Tree’, and one of the lowest bounce rate asset was under a minute long and was titled ‘How to Carve a Turkey’. The last thing they looked at was the whole site performance over the last quarter. The assets performing best (lowest bounce rates) all had lengths of under 1:30.

Using this information, the client is able to put together a specific type of content to focus on for the holiday 2017 season. They’ll be producing holiday-specific content that focuses around ‘how to’ and ‘DIY’ food videos, and they will keep all clips under 1:30 in length. The data showed them what type of content to repeat from last year, and what type to avoid.

Before You Leave for Vacation, Make Sure Stack can Handle Anything that is Thrown at it

One of the most exciting things about Q4 is that traffic and click volume skyrockets. One of the scariest things is that your site might not be prepared for it. Take the time to confirm with your web and services providers (your CMS, OVP, CDN, SSP, Ad Network, etc.). If you aren’t prepared for a rapid increase in volume, seriously consider investing in an upgrade.

Things like heavy site UI, video load latency, and repeated ads are all reasons for viewers to bounce, and if your infrastructure isn’t prepared, your revenue losses will stack up. The importance of user experience is compounded when using a continuous video experience, because users become more engaged the longer they watch. So, for example, a 5-10% increase in bounce rate can translate into a 10-15% decrease in total consumption. The same is true if you proactively invest in a better experience for your site visitors – a minimal drop in bounce rate can have substantial increase in total consumption.

These precautions are all compounded when human resources are slim due to holiday closures and end of year vacations. All the more reason to prepare ahead of time for anything that might come your way.

SP Marketplace Delivers Power BI Dashboards in their Out-of-the-Box Office 365 Portals

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December 4, 2017

SP Marketplace Delivers Power BI Dashboards in their Out-of-the-Box Office 365 Portals

SharePoint Marketplace, the Leader in the Office 365 Digital Workplace Solutions, Announced a Move From SharePoint Chart Web Parts to Power BI Template Dashboards Within Their Products

SharePoint Marketplace, better known as SP Marketplace, is a leading provider of the Office 365 Digital Workplace Solutions. SP Digital Workplace Suite provides an Operational Portal Structure anchored by an Intranet with portals for HR, IT, Employee Self-Service, CRM, and Facilities departments. These solutions are a seamless part of Office 365 and run on SharePoint Online or On Premise.

They recently announced a move from SharePoint chart web parts to Power BI template dashboards within their products. These Power BI templates drive Employee Services and Sales Business visibility. SP Marketplace’s Power BI templates in their Office 365 Solutions provide Ultimate Visibility across all departments that is impossible to achieve with standalone applications.

Also Read: Pepperi Enhances B2B Sales and Merchandising Business Insights with Microsoft Power BI

SP Marketplace understands that a determining factor of a successful digital transformation is access to well-rounded data within the organization. The advantage of Power BI is that it uses many data sources like SharePoint, Google Analytics, Salesforce and many more.

“With Power BI dashboards we can now create business intelligence that transcends all departments and sites. The integration is fantastic! We’ve replaced chart web parts and now you can easily share reports on public web pages, direct links or send them to your other Power BI users via email,” said Darrell Trimble, CEO of SP Marketplace.

The Power BI dashboards are 100% customizable and are available now at no extra charge with any SP Digital Workplace Suite Portal Product.

Trimble added, “Our customers can now merge operational data from our functional applications with data from other sources like ERP, Payroll, and other systems. This now enables us to present KPIs and Executive Dashboards from our Intranet.”

Executive Dashboard Custom Services Offered

Along with the embedded dashboards in their products, SP Marketplace is announcing their Executive Dashboard service for developing custom dashboards, and embedding them within the Portal Structure for customers.

TechBytes with Mona Yousry, Chief Data Scientist, SABIO Mobile

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December 4, 2017

Mona Yousry
Chief Data Scientist, SABIO Mobile

In August, Sabio Mobile hired Mona Yousry as Chief Data Scientist. We spoke to her to find out how she see the sector and where the AI/ML sector is headed.

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MTS: Tell us about your role at SABIO and the team you handle?
Mona Yousry: My role at Sabio is to lead the ML/AI efforts to continue the development and improvement of App Science, our Predictive AI engine that is able to profile the multi-dimensional aspects of behaviors and habits.

MTS: How does APEX provide customers with better targeting capabilities for mobile?
Mona: APEX provides ad serving and campaign builder tools. This is the HEART of providing successful campaigns for our customers. Embedded in APEX is the Science and Predictive AI engine, that is the BRAIN powering Sabio’s operations. Through the data analysis of numerous data points performed by App Science that include the apps a person has downloaded on their device and their location, our APEX platform provides better targeting capabilities by delivering ads to those unique consumer audiences identified with App Science and its predictive ability. Not only delivering ads to existing target consumers but also identifying the probability of a future consumer as well.

MTS: How do you work with “Semantic Grid Computing” at SABIO?
Mona: The idea of the grid is the ability to analyze unstructured big data that is multivariate in nature which requires computing in close to real time. That is the essence of Sabio’s App Science.

Also Read: Interview with Aziz Rahim, CEO, SABIO Mobile

MTS: What are the key differences between location data, proximity data and customer ID data? How do they provide a complete picture of how mobile users behave or move along the buyer’s journey?
Mona: Our data analysis journey takes many dimensions as does the buyer’s journey. Location data, proximity data, and customer ID data, such as their App profile, are all mapped to a time window and triangulated with multiple signals to improve accuracy. As a buyer moves through the sales funnel or buyer’s journey, their movement from interest to desire and purchase/action are exemplified in many cases by their downloading and use of certain apps and visits of locations. The idea is to provide relevant information and ads to user ids that is consistent with their likes, habits and behaviors as they move along their journey towards a purchase.

MTS: What is the foundation of geo-story technology at SABIO?
Mona: The geo story is one dimension of how we understand behaviors and profiles. Because App Science is a Predictive AI technology, the ability to analyze a person’s location history or geo-story for probabilistic location patterns provides another layer of information unique to mobile devices.

MTS: In a mobile-first era, how do AI/ML technologies come together to drive customer engagement?
Mona: It is simple…we need to understand trends to provide relevant information AI/ML develop patterns and topics that emulate human thinking.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Mona.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Also Read: TechBytes with Gregory Fulton, VP, Product, AdRoll

Interview with Sydney Sloan, CMO, Alfresco

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December 4, 2017

[mnky_team name=”Sydney Sloan” position=” CMO, Alfresco”][/mnky_team]

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

“Speed and responsiveness are the new metrics of successful companies, combined with the ability to seamlessly access information and arm people with the information that will empower them. “

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to be part of an enterprise content services company?
I’ve spent my entire career working for software companies that focus on building applications that foster collaboration, communication and the automation of business processes to better serve customers. I’ve been at Alfresco for three years now, and it’s been exciting to watch the enterprise content services market evolve and see the importance of content grow over time. There is a lot of value that can be extracted from information that was previously “locked away,” and now we can help people access the information they need when and where they need it, instead of spending countless hours searching for it.

MTS: As a pioneer in content services, how does Alfresco enable B2B companies to deliver truly personalized customer experience and engagement?
Alfresco has been a disruptor in the content management market and recognized as an innovator since our inception. Information has to be easy to find and integrated into the way people work, not the other way around. So that’s what we’re focused on – making it as easy as possible for people to access, consume and share information across the enterprise, as well as ensuring that development teams can create applications on top of the Alfresco platform. Speed and responsiveness are the new metrics of successful companies, combined with the ability to seamlessly access information and arm people with the information that will empower them to perform the tasks in front of them and help them determine what they need to do.

MTS: How do you bring collaboration to the core of digital business workflow?
You put people in the center. You have to apply design thinking and prototype with your users and continuously iterate. There is a great article featuring one of our customers, Capital One, which describes how they reimagined the customer onboarding process and ensured that everyone who is part of the process can participate without friction. They also removed useless steps and reduced interactions by around 70%. We talk about “digital business flow” as a way to design for the easy movement of information throughout an organization – helping people connect with structured and unstructured information seamlessly. I think it’s an inspiring concept.

MTS: What are the major challenges for companies to become truly data-enabled organizations without putting additional pressure on the existing IT infrastructure?
We are awash with data, and there’s only going to be more and more data that can be collected. Our first step to becoming more data-driven at Alfresco was to establish a data governance team to harmonize across our data sets, agree on the source of truth and prioritize what information we needed to capture to efficiently run our business. Good data leads to good decisions, so you need to focus first on data quality, then you can determine what you want to analyze. We have customers, such as FINRA, which are leveraging cloud providers like Amazon Web Services to process data sets, using computing power, they never could before. They are managing critical data at an impressive scale.

MTS: How do you see new data governance policies, brand safety regulations and anti-ad fraud campaigns impacting the world of digital media?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the largest directive I’m aware of in the past decade that will make organizations seriously examine their internal policies. So far, cybersecurity concerns have dominated expert discussions, but businesses cannot ignore issues that surround the right to erasure, data portability, and governance. GDPR goes beyond the mere protection of data from security risks; it focuses, equally heavily, on the appropriate use of it within organizations. As the implementation deadline of May 2018 looms closer, companies need effective Information Governance and to establish business processes to manage risk and avoid non-compliance – simply and efficiently. Someone will be the first to fail, and no one wants to be that poster child.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Conversica is really interesting and, in my view, the first practical use of an artificial intelligence application within marketing. They use chatbots to engage early-stage leads or to follow up on a volume of leads all at once. It works like a “human sales assistant,” reaching out and trying to engage customers in a “conversation.” I also advise a company called Folloze. They provide new and better ways to empower salespeople to share high-quality content with prospects in an engaging way – while still keeping marketing as a key participant in the process and ultimately making account-based engagement more personalized, at scale.

Also Read: Interview with Carl Landers, CMO, Conversica

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
I’ll focus on the top five technologies that I couldn’t live without. Marketo and Salesforce are the foundation of our stack. We use Demandbase for our account-based marketing efforts, and, since we’re an open source company, we use Drupal for our website, connected with Google Analytics. We’re currently looking at how to add a sales prospecting tool, like an Outreach or SalesLoft, for our outbound prospecting efforts.

Also Read: TechBytes with Christopher Golec, CEO, Demandbase

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign?
Our most successful program is an insurance campaign that is in flight right now. We’re very proud to have many top insurance companies select Alfresco as their modern, cloud-native, process and content platform. So, we are targeting other property and casualty companies to share those success stories with. Our strategy is to surround, or swarm, these customers, identifying 100+ people in a target account. Our results with this approach have far outpaced successes we’ve seen in other campaigns.

I believe the success is all about the quality of the contact data, the relevance of our story, and the coordination between the marketing, SDR and sales teams. Once we launch a swarm, we can see where we have “heat.” If we’ve sent something relevant to 100 people on that account and ten people respond, we know there is interest and continue to go after it even faster.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
I like to be on the edge of innovation, but I’m also pragmatic. I think we need to prove the AI model a bit more to determine where it adds value. Currently, I’m in research and “wait and see” mode, listening to my peers and seeing where they notice success. It goes back to quality data, the quality of the questions, setting good hypotheses, and your ability to get good analysts to help you manage and analyze the data and then figure out how to apply it to AI scenarios. As it stands today, we’re a couple of years out from AI being a true, integrated part of the common martech stack.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Passionately!

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
My mobile phone, mostly for texting to get quick answers, but I constantly have to remind people that the phone is actually used for making calls! If you need to communicate with someone, call them and talk and get out of email. I also can’t live without Tableau for our dashboards, PowerPoint (I’m a visual communicator) and, of course, Alfresco!

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Having strong personal relationships and trust with my peers and the people with whom I need to work on a daily basis.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
“HomoDeus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” by Yuval Noah Harari, and “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble,” by Dan Lyons. I get most of my daily news from NPR and LinkedIn Pulse.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Your team is your peers, not the people who work for you.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Heidi Bullock from Engagio.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Sydney” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3daf31-7ef2″]

Accomplished marketer with decades of experience in senior leadership roles including product marketing, customer experience, demand generation and communications. Sydney brings passion, skill and a customer-centric focus to drive tangible sales results. She has a strong track record of building global teams and bringing new products to market as she is able to link business strategies through execution and customer adoption. A creative, solutions-driven and achievement oriented individual experienced in developing and executing marketing strategies to build awareness and generate demand across a variety of customer and industry segments.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Alfresco” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3daf31-7ef2″]

At Alfresco, we believe that business is a constant flow of information and decisions, and it’s our mission to make that flow fast, seamlessly and intelligently. Alfresco customers rely on our open, modern platform to digitize critical business processes and connect people with the information they need, quickly and effortlessly. Our vibrant global ecosystem includes more than 200 solution partners and thousands of open source developers. About the Alfresco Digital Business Platform The Alfresco Digital Business Platform lets IT quickly develop modern, engaging solutions that accelerate the flow of business. The open, modular platform is easy to build on, integrate and extend for fast time to value and true digital transformation.

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

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

Intellitec Solutions Achieves Microsoft Competencies Gold ERP Competency and Silver CRM Competency

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December 1, 2017

Intellitec Solutions Achieves Microsoft Competencies Gold ERP Competency and Silver CRM Competency

Firm Earns Distinction and Market Leadership Through Demonstrated Technology Success and Customer Commitment

Intellitec Solutions announced that it has attained a Microsoft Gold Enterprise Resource Planning competency and a Silver Cloud Customer Relationship Management competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment. A portfolio of competencies showcases that Intellitec Solutions is committed to focusing on in-demand, business solution areas, along with ensuring it can meet the evolving needs of customers because of market changes.

Also Read: Lead Liaison to Integrate Marketing Automation with Microsoft Dynamics 365

To earn a Microsoft competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise and, for gold competencies, designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. Partners must also submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects and pass technology and/or sales assessments. For gold competencies, partners must also implement a yearly customer satisfaction study and, for many competencies, meet a revenue commitment.

Intellitec Solutions provides implementation, customization, and support for the Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL ERP products, as well as Microsoft Dynamics 365. Intellitec works with a variety of industries and has developed specialization catering to the needs of Long Term Care facilities, Distributors, and Facilities Management groups. Intellitec Solutions will now be in a better position to serve their clients moving forward, by receiving the enhanced benefits included as Gold partner. The certification also represents a continued commitment by Intellitec to the Microsoft family of products. Intellitec Solutions recently became a Tier One Cloud Solution Provider and provides their clients with Azure and Office 365 licenses.

Also Read: Marketing Technology Firm Concep Ensures Easy Access To Its B2B Marketing Solution For Microsoft Dynamics 365 Crm Via Appsource

“These Microsoft competencies showcase our expertise and commitment in today’s technology market and demonstrate our deep knowledge of Microsoft and its products. Our plan is to accelerate our customers’ success by serving as technology advisors for their business demands,” said Rick Sommer, President of Intellitec Solutions.

Attaining the Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management competency demonstrates partner expertise in deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 and ERP financial and supply chain management solutions. Equipped with exclusive training, the latest software and support, partners help their customers match their needs. The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.

dotCMS Hires Stefan Schinkel as New Chief Sales Officer

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PRNewswire

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December 1, 2017

dotCMS Hires Stefan Schinkel as New Chief Sales Officer

Stefan Schinkel’s Experience in Another CMS Company in San Francisco Will Help DotCMS Accelerate Growth in Digital Marketplace

dotCMS, a leading-edge, open source, Java Content Management System and Digital Experience Platform software company, announced that Stefan Schinkel has joined the company as Chief Sales Officer, effective December 1, 2017. Schinkel will report to Timothy Prince ‘Tim’ Brigham, and become one of the senior executives within the company.

Tim Brigham, CRO of dotCMS, said, “We are very pleased that Stefan has decided to join the dotCMS team. With the success and track record, he has created over the past few years, we knew he was the type of professional we needed to accelerate our growth in the digital marketplace. Stefan’s skills and leadership capabilities will enable us to continue extending our offerings and presence to become the leader in digital experience solutions for our clients and help them grow their revenues.”

Also Read: Built.io Flow Teams with Zilkr to Automate Telecommunications Workflow Integrations

Schinkel was most recently Sr. VP at BloomReach, a CMS software company based in San Francisco where he was instrumental in the North American and global growth of the firm. He added, “Having already had a professional relationship with the team at dotCMS, I knew how advanced Will and the engineers have made the product, but I also see real differentiators that we plan to highlight in our marketing and sales strategies. We’re going to continue building a great team of experts that delivers real value for our clients, and also leads them by creating dynamic digital platforms that enable their growth.”

Also Read: Xillio Launches Cloud-Based Developer API for Content Integration

Founded in 2003, dotCMS is a privately owned US company with offices in Miami, Florida; San Diego, California, Boston, Massachusetts and San Jose, Costa Rica. It is a leading, open source content management and digital experience platform for companies that want innovation and performance driving their digital engagements including websites and other content-driven applications. Extensible and massively scalable, both small and large organizations can rapidly deliver personalized and engaging content across browsers, mobile devices, channels, second screens, and endpoints — all from a single system.

Seismic Listed in Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Content Management for Sales for Second Consecutive Year

By

PRNewswire

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December 1, 2017

Seismic Listed in Gartner's Market Guide for Digital Content Management for Sales for Second Consecutive Year

Sales Content Management Vendors Are Continuing to Develop Strong Capabilities and Drive Product Innovation Through Enhanced Platform Capabilities, Gartner Report Finds

Seismic, the leading global marketing and sales enablement solution, announced that they are listed as a Representative Vendor included in Gartner’s 2017 Market Guide for Digital Content Management for Sales. The report provides an overview of the digital content management for sales landscape and lists 19 Representative Vendors in the field.

“We feel Gartner’s new Market Guide is a valuable document for those looking to stay updated on the overall market direction in this growing space and how vendors within it are expanding capabilities to fit their unique set of customers’ needs. We are therefore glad to have once again been cited as a Representative Vendor, as Seismic is dedicated to ensuring that our set of customers continue to gain tremendous value in increasing sales productivity and sales content ROI out of a platform specifically designed for large enterprises,” said Doug Winter, co-founder and CEO at Seismic.

Also Read: TechBytes with Dave Myron, VP Product Marketing, Seismic Software

According to Gartner, digital sales content management applications “improve the delivery of internal- and external-facing content to salespeople, or improve engagement with prospects and clients, and increase win rates, deal velocity and deal sizes. They are most commonly used to support long-cycle B2B and B2C sales processes, but they also apply to transactional sales processes, such as detailing merchandisers on the retail selling floor.” Gartner also notes that it “has seen a steady evolution in [the digital content management for sales] market over the last two years, and vendors continue to expand their capabilities and drive innovation in terms of content development, delivery, recommendations, and analytics.”

Also Read: Seismic Collaborates with Microsoft to Increase Sales Productivity and Content ROI for Large Enterprises

Seismic was also listed in two additional recent analyst reports by different organizations. Last month, Aragon Research named Seismic a Leader in their Globe for Sales Engagement for the second straight year. Additionally, Forrester Research named Seismic a Leader in sales enablement automation in The Forrester Wave: Sales Enablement Automation Systems, Q4 2016.

“This recent string of recognitions by analyst firms, we believe, further validates Seismic’s leading position in the space,” said Winter, adding, “As we look towards 2018, we are excited to continue to define what it means to be a complete marketing and sales enablement solution through continued product innovation and customer success.”

The Emperor Has No Clicks: Don’t Stick with Clicks

By

Scott Swanson

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December 1, 2017

The Emperor Has No Clicks: Don’t Stick with Clicks

The other day I met the Head of Digital marketing for a Fortune 100 major financial institution. We were having coffee and discussing the future of digital marketing. Even though we were talking about mobile, this person was laser-focused on one thing and one thing only: Click-through rates. Their goal was to avoid the notorious low CTRs of display advertising and so they were making campaign and creative decisions based on that objective.

Also Read: Swrve Extends Leading Mobile Customer Interaction Platform to Support Streaming Video and OTT TV Platforms

As the founder of a mobile advertising platform, I found myself in an awkward, but not unfamiliar position. How do I tell this individual, who has an indisputable track record of success in marketing, that this fundamental mobile strategy would steer their business in the wrong direction for years to come? How could I cure this addiction to clicks?

It was not an isolated experience. For lack of a better metric and the simple truth that old habits die hard, click-through continues to hold its position as the center of the digital and mobile ad universe. It’s been around a long time. It’s easy to measure. It’s easy to understand.

But, at the same time, ‘clicking’ is not an experience that consumers seek out. It rarely creates value or delight. And, far too often, it happens by accident in mobile. This makes click-through about as effective a means of gauging the success of a campaign as a stubbed toe serves to measure the success of a coffee table.

You know this. We all know this. Why can’t we act on it?

Too Eager To “Click” With Marketers?

Which brings me back to that coffee meeting. If you’ve ever been on the technology side of the marketing equation, you know that your audience is weary.

Call it Lumascape-fatigue or just general skepticism, but there are enough solutions out there that it’s really easy for agencies and marketers to, essentially, ‘swipe left’ without a ton of consideration. (This is totally fair; marketers are navigating through a ton of redundancy in the ad tech space and, further, instincts play an important role in business decisions.)

Also Read: Analysis of Mobile vs. Desktop Purchasing Trends 2017 for the Hospitality Industry

But, this dynamic can make it difficult to push back on the decisions, like CTR, that are guiding ad spend—particularly for those doing the groundwork on individual campaigns.

It’s worth asking if we, as an industry, are moving too quickly to ask the right questions. At a time when there’s really no arguing that mobile is the dominant medium, are we putting the health of businesses at risk for the sake of a meaningless metric?

This question is answered over and over; it’s answered in fat finger studies, documented ad fraud and click-farms, consumer feedback, and the rise in ad blocking.

Data and intuition alike are telling us that we’re limiting the success of marketing, aggravating people and threatening the long-term health of ad-supported content. The emperor has no clicks, yet we all keep coming back to count them.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This isn’t the first appeal of its kind, but we need to do more than write about this problem. Those of us who spend our days and nights considering what it means to engage a consumer and how to build positive and productive brand/consumer/content relationships need to be willing to tell CMOs and other leaders why they need to break the click-through habit.

And, we need to ensure that message reaches everyone in the ecosystem so that agencies, vendors and everyone in the trenches aren’t measuring their own professional success against an obsolete metric.

But, most importantly, we need to offer different, stronger and smarter solutions that make advertising better for all involved. This is an industry-wide problem and we need to tackle it together by having an honest conversation about what it means to be successful in mobile. Who’s game?

Tact.ai Launches the First Conversational CRM Skill for Amazon’s Alexa for Business

By

PRNewswire

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December 1, 2017

Tact.ai Launches the First Conversational CRM Skill for Amazon's Alexa for Business

Tact.ai Presented Tact Sales Assistant for Amazon Alexa at AWS re:invent 2017 in Las Vegas

Tact.ai, the sales experience platform for the intelligent edge, released of the Tact Sales Assistant Skill for Amazon Alexa. Selected as a launch partner for Alexa for Business, the Tact Skill unlocks a conversational and bidirectional interface into the tools that salespeople use every day such as Salesforce, LinkedIn and Microsoft Exchange. Tact.ai was onstage at Amazon Web Services’ re: invent 2017 in Las Vegas, NV presenting the first certified enterprise CRM sales Skill for Alexa on November 30 at the Launchpad event at AWS Village.

Tact Sales Assistant Skill Unveiled as Alexa’s First Certified CRM Skill

With the announcement of Alexa for Business, Amazon unveiled a select group of companies who have created personalized experiences with select Alexa Skills. The Tact Sales Assistant Skill uses Alexa Voice Profiles, providing authentication and personalized experiences when Alexa recognizes the user’s voice.

Also Read: Tact.ai Accelerates Sales Transformation at Fortune 500 Customers by Bringing CRM to the Intelligent Edge

More Ways to Unlock the New Tact Skill
The Tact Skill can be set up two different ways. Users can go to the new Alexa for Business App Store and go through the standard account linking flow. A newer deployment method announced today allows businesses to create private, pre-configured and fully customizable Skills set up to understand company-specific commands and conversations. For enterprises, this allows IT organizations to offer their employees a securely, managed, voice-controlled way to access corporate information from systems like Salesforce, Zendesk, LinkedIn, Exchange and more.

Tact.ai CEO Joins AWS’ Kevin Crew for On Stage Presentation at re: invent 17

The Alexa team showcased select skill developers, including Tact.ai CEO Chuck Ganapathi, who debuted the first conversational CRM Skill for Alexa for Business at the Launchpad session. “Edge computing is fundamentally changing the way we interact with machines; from humans having to understand machines, to machines understanding what we need and having the ability to fulfill it. We’re excited to collaborate with the AWS Alexa team to bring to market a more natural and productive way for salespeople to work. With Tact for Alexa, CRM and other enterprise software now conform to the user, no longer the other way around,” said Chuck.

How will AI Feed Account Based Marketing?

By

Stuart Newton

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December 1, 2017

How will AI Feed Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a powerful technique to deliver targeted and personalized engagements to customers in key accounts. ABM Leadership Alliance’s recent research report shows that B2B marketers who adopt ABM can expect a 171% uplift in annual contract value – so perhaps it’s no wonder that according to data by Constellation Research, 92% of companies plan to implement an ABM strategy in 2017.

Also Read: Coolfire Solutions Delivers Actionable Intelligence to Meet Data Challenges

However, according to the same stud, it appears that despite overwhelming evidence of the revenue growth opportunity presented by ABM, many companies aren’t entirely unconvinced of its successful execution or whether they will achieve a satisfactory return on investment. Why is this?

That old nemesis of scalability seems to be the primary cause of concern.

Meeting the Challenge of ABM at Scale With Artificial Intelligence

ABM campaigns are currently, for the most part, only feasible for targeting a few key accounts. This lack of scalability hinges on a company’s ability to direct significant time and resources towards researching and engaging customers. Whilst many marketers have adapted by building a content function within the team, all too often the collateral they produce is generic, and furthermore they have to ‘guess’ where customers are in the buying cycle – a direct contradiction to the goal of relevant, timely, hyper-personalized marketing in the ‘age of the customer’.

Artificial Intelligence is set to turn ABM on its head by
introducing hyper-personalization at scale.

Predictive analytics will feed the ABM process with never-before-seen real-time insight into customer needs and goals, pain points, market dynamics and competitor activity, sentiments and buying triggers. Millions of structured and unstructured data points will be crunched, analysed and filtered to deliver the in-depth account knowledge needed to drive campaigns and personalised engagement opportunities, that target not just a few select accounts but hundreds or perhaps thousands, without the need to increase the size of the marketing team or create large quantities of marketing collateral.

Also Read: Beyond Personal – Why Individualization Is the Key to Marketing Success

But more than just cutting through the white noise, reducing research time and furnishing marketers with rich customer data, machine learning algorithms will remove the guesswork when it comes to achieving relevance and timing. No longer will marketing teams have to produce generic mass broadcast communications, spamming customers, and prospects with untargeted, untimely and irrelevant messages. Instead, they will know the best time to act and the most appropriate attention-grabbing content for each individual customer – generating personalized 1:1 emails, customised website experiences and hyper-personalized brand interactions at scale with laser-targeted relevance and pinpoint timing accuracy.

What Will the Future Look Like?

As AI collides with ABM the possibilities are immense.

As time goes by and the volume of results data and precision improves, it will be possible to construct predictive models using machine learning to find patterns of event types, market challenges and future opportunities ripe for direct action, whilst at the same time correlating patterns of open rates and sharing activity across channels to recommend the most relevant content and delivery mechanism, and the likelihood the customer will want to receive it. Step forward again and AI-powered applications may even act as a proxy, delivering content on the marketer’s behalf for the ultimate in ‘always on’ ABM.

I think it’s fair to say I have only scratched the surface of how AI could feed ABM in the future – the innovation is still very much in its infancy. But even with development at its current stage, it’s quashing fears and reticence to invest by solving the immediate challenge – the combination of ABM and Artificial Intelligence gives marketers the ability to deliver highly personalized ABM strategies at scale.

TechBytes with Yuri Khidekel, CEO, Artsai

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December 1, 2017

Yuri Khidekel
Founder & CEO – Artsai

We are in that phase of utilizing technology where marketers are flooded with various automation solutions for omnichannel successes. From building a performance marketing suite to enhancing overall vision into customer journeys, modern marketers can leverage adaptive marketing solutions for better communication with billions of consumers. To understand how adaptive marketing can transform your programmatic strategies, we spoke to Yuri Khidekel, CEO, Artsai.

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MTS: What’s the idea behind conceiving Artsai?
Yuri Khidekel: There’s a huge oversaturation in the marketing industry, with each one of the more than 5,000 companies in the ecosystem addressing each tiny piece of the marketer’s need including various type of inventory, creatives, data management, analytics, attribution, optimization, etc. Brand marketers are currently juggling an average of five to ten disconnected marketing technologies and vendors. This not only creates major inefficiencies and increases integration costs, but at the same time decreases campaign performance and revenue because these products cannot share data and optimize overall marketer’s ROI.

Artsai, on the other hand, is user-centric and focuses on optimizing the whole customer digital journey rather than on disconnected marketing functions. We call our approach adaptive marketing automation as we adapt marketing to the whole user digital journey instead of splitting it into disjoint pieces. Artsai’s AI enabled stack of solutions continuously tracks user engagements across all digital environments and optimizes the next user engagement with the marketer based on previous user engagements replacing multiple disconnected marketing products. Brands and publishers can now seamlessly optimize creative content to each individual customer engagement across different digital environments, rather than having to juggle multiple disconnected platforms and try to reconcile them with each other (as with the traditional marketing stack). This makes for a much more efficient use of time, money, and resources, while at the same time providing an individualized marketing experience for each user.

MTS: What’s the future roadmap for Artsai in AI-enabled customer journey analytics?
Yuri: Right now, as we come out of stealth mode, we’re focusing most closely on using our patent-pending technology to help as many brands as possible deliver their message as efficiently as possible.

We actively work on realizing the full potential of our machine learning technology so that we could learn better from the past user engagements and generate even better insights for our customers.

It’s also important to note that while analytics is an important part of what we do, we are much more than an analytics company.

MTS: What markets are you targeting to maximize Artsai’s reach?
Yuri: When it comes to marketing, one-too-many doesn’t work well anymore. Delivering personal experiences, whether they be digital or in real life, is important. For a big brand, this is key, as it makes the consumer experience feel individualized and personalizes the brand itself.
Artsai is excited to work with brands who are looking for this kind of one-to-one feel and personalized approach: with our product, brands of any size can leverage our wealth of data to create optimized creative and content for each individual user–at every step of their journey–all using AI.

MTS: Tell us about Artsai’s product suite?
Yuri: Artsai has two 75-page patents pending and our adaptive marketing automation technology is powered by an interconnected artificial intelligence marketing stack, which performs multiple marketing tasks, such as new customer acquisition, user retention, retargeting, re-engagement, app monetization and content optimization.

With our technology, the entire customer lifecycle is optimized as a whole and adapts as the user travels through the various stages of their journey.

Brands and publishers can seamlessly adapt creative content and track audiences across different digital environments, including programmatic exchanges, social media, premium publishers and marketer’s own digital properties. This ultimately allows brands to maintain a hyper-relevant and consistent consumer conversation.

MTS: How do you see yourself competing against the more established AI-centric martech companies?
Yuri: Well, for one, our technology is all-new! Artsai is the first user- centric company to use AI to optimize the entire customer digital journey and consolidate the dated and incredibly inefficient marketing stack.

To date, marketing companies have really only used artificial intelligence to focus on improving campaign performance — they’ve missed the bigger opportunity to fundamentally change the overall marketing stack, by holistically optimizing the entire customer lifecycle journey. We are focused on making everything simpler by reducing the number of disparate platforms brands need to operate to help them run more efficiently, increasing their revenue and reducing their marketing costs.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Yuri.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Also Read: TechBytes with Agatha Rymanowska, SVP, Enterprise Operations, Conversant

Interview with Gustav Mellentin, CEO, Adform

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December 1, 2017

[mnky_team name=”Gustav Mellentin” position=”CEO, Adform”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/adform” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/gustav-mellentin-9426166/”]

“Data Management and Customer Data Platforms are like a super sports car. They are beautiful, but if they are only parked in a garage, you are not getting what you have paid for.”

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to start an open, full stack adtech company?
We got started in 2002 when the ad industry was on the cusp of a significant change and that created a series of incredible opportunities. At the time the ad industry was a $500 million-dollar industry that was suffering from efficiency issues and was lacking consolidated systems and solid measurement. My partners and I decided we wanted to solve some of the efficiency issues by creating a new software called Adform. At that time, we were only an ad-serving platform. We have come a long way since then!

MTS: How do you see audience data segmentation improving with the maturity of Data Management Platforms?
Data Management and Customer Data Platforms are like a super sports car. They are beautiful, but if they are only parked in a garage, you are not getting what you have paid for. Most improvements will come by investing time and resources into the setup, into building global blueprints, and local adaptations aligned with your data strategy. The machine can only be as smart as the people using it. My advice is: Combine your human intelligence with adtech power and artificial intelligence to turbocharge your Data Management Platform.

MTS: How does Adform leverage Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to optimize ad spending?
AI/ML has been the core of our technology for a while. Adform is built on top of a shared machine-learning platform that powers not only trading (“spending”) but also Dynamic Creative, Audience Extensions, and Fraud Detection etc.

Our expert data scientists and engineers are constantly A/B testing different approaches to find the right sweet spot for each algorithm. At the end, there is still no such thing as a free lunch. It takes time and effort to find the right AI/ML method, feature vector, and to improve it over time. A proper and structured A/B testing is at the core of all of this in order to truly find out what is working for our clients and what is not.

MTS: What are the core tenets of Adform’s programmatic stack? How do you intend to grow your programmatic capabilities?
We believe in the synergy between the different components of the ad stack and being fully connected to a wider eco-system. This coincides with a more effective offering due to efficient workflows with unified UI, real-time data storage, and reduced data loss. These feed our focus, which is on simplicity paired with optimizing the user experience and the ability to handle more campaigns with less manual work (integrating AI everywhere, audience first) to deliver better results that scales.

MTS: With GDPR round the corner, how should brands empower themselves with the right strategy to sail through the challenge?
GDPR is a subject we take very seriously. We have actively worked with IAB Europe for a long time and we are extremely busy with GDPR requests since most brands and agencies require a lot of assistance on this. Cookies become personal data under GDPR. This means that marketing departments are legally required to prove compliance to the authorities with respect to all of their ad tech and many of their martech deployments. That is a huge task for our clients and agency partners and GDPR demands a lot of attention internally both from IT and legal departments. Our approach is to provide our clients with a full GDPR readiness package which includes action lists, certifications, and more which we supply after conducting workshops, but I am afraid it is too large a topic to outline the entire strategy they need to follow here. I can only encourage everybody to make sure they are ready before May 25, 2018!

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
The most interesting is by far Amazon’s pivot towards entering the ad tech landscape. They present an exciting disruptor that is already starting to force behavior changes from the duopoly. It’s hard to predict what this means for the long-term health of the advertising landscape, but it does provide one of the most interesting shakeups in the last 24 months.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Demand Side Platform
Data Management Platform
Ad Server
Supply Side Platform & Private Marketplace

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign?
We are using our own platform and a unique blend of optimization and creative tools to drive the best digital campaigns in the industry. Plus, we are lucky enough to have a team of world-class designers and an award-winning production team. Our target audience are prospects and existing clients and each campaign has clear KPIs such as the number of signups for our informational webinars.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
We have been preparing for a while. Our strategy is focusing on gradually fully automatizing all aspects of advertising while still allowing experts to give input or control the system. All sophisticated AI / ML approaches runs as black boxes and interpretability of how the decision was taken is difficult. Decision makers do not fully trust the machines until the machines have proven over time that they are delivering at a higher rate than human experts. As a result, we consider AI centricity a long journey which basically is centered around trust. As such, we have built an AI / ML platform capable of taking over all aspects of digital advertising but at the same time are opening up the box as wide as we can such that people learn to trust the machines.

This Is How I Work

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

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

Momondo.com (Great Danish travel app)
Mobilepay (Simple money transfer tool. Good to have when your teen daughter is in desperate need of support.)
Nemlig.com (Grocery delivery, quite new for Denmark and I love it!)

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Evernote/Jot

MTS: What are you currently reading?
I rarely have time to sit down to read a book, but recently read and enjoyed Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. If I have time I really enjoy historical documentaries through my TV app. I do however follow a lot of news through apps, with The Economist as one of my regular go-tos.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“Hire people who are better than yourself.” It’s a bit of a classic, but I find it’s one of those adages that becomes truer over time. One of the biggest challenges in leadership is finding and then delegating power to a network of carefully chosen, highly skilled people. As Adform has grown from three people, where we could take care of everything, to more than 800, it has required a constant re-examination of who we’re hiring, who we rely on, and the internal expertise we have. The incredible caliber of the people I get to work with on a daily basis as a result is one of my favorite things about where the Adform journey has taken me, and something that keeps me perpetually learning and inspired to be better.

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

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Gustav” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d”]

Adform is the leading independent and open full stack advertising technology platform that encompasses data, creativity and trading into one seamless enterprise product suite servicing media agencies, trading desks and advertisers. All of our products are modular and easily inter-operate with all other point solutions used throughout the digital advertising ecosystem.

Adform was founded in Denmark in 2002 and is one of the world’s largest private and independent advertising technology companies. With offices in 18 countries, Adform has more than 780 employees globally throughout Europe, North America and APAC.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About adform” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80edaf37-bd3d”]

Adform is the leading independent and open full stack advertising technology platform that encompasses data, creativity and trading into one seamless enterprise product suite servicing media agencies, trading desks and advertisers. All of our products are modular and easily inter-operate with all other point solutions used throughout the digital advertising ecosystem. Adform was founded in Denmark in 2002 and is one of the world’s largest private and independent advertising technology companies. With offices in 18 countries, Adform has more than 780 employees globally throughout Europe, North America and APAC.

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

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

Public Support Forums: An Underrated Marketing Tool

By

Aytekin Tank

-

November 30, 2017