TechBytes with Agatha Rymanowska, SVP, Enterprise Operations, Conversant

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November 14, 2017

Agatha Rymanowska
SVP, Enterprise Operations, Conversant

Conversant is the industry leader in personalized digital advertising and the digital media arm of Epsilon. The Conversant One-to-One Relationship Engine (Core), Conversant’s massive, continually learning engine that builds on the industry’s largest set of consumer data, was recently awarded “Best Industry Innovation” at the 2017 iMedia ASPY Awards. We spoke with Agatha Rymanowska, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Operations, to understand how Conversant tailors each brand interaction to an individual consumer, the company’s approach to ad quality, and what’s on the horizon for personalization.

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MTS: How does your team help Conversant in delivering personalized digital marketing solutions?
Agatha Rymanowska: My team supports the entire client “lifecycle” from start to finish. This includes supporting our business development team through initial client discussions, integrating new clients onto Conversant’s platform, architecting and launching client programs, and more. Wherever a client is in the onboarding or launch process, my team is right there, with them, to provide ongoing technical oversight.

It starts with data. We first and foremost integrate with clients to ensure we have access to the right data that supports their marketing objectives. My team works with clients to integrate all of their digital touchpoints, as well as offline transactions. This enables Conversant to have a holistic view of our clients’ customers and understand their purchasing behaviors, which ultimately fuels personalization. Upon defining each client’s unique marketing goals, we then collaborate with several cross-functional teams to architect a solution that meets their needs and launch their program.

MTS: What are the fundamental tenets of Conversant’s ad quality approach? Would it remain scalable once GDPR norms come into force?
Agatha: Conversant’s approach to ad quality is based on three key fundamentals: brand safety, viewability and fraud prevention. The industry has evolved in such a way that focusing on all of these areas simultaneously is becoming the new norm. Poor ad quality, fueled by non-viewable ads, brand safety violations, and bot-driven traffic, not only has a major impact on advertising results but can cause long-term damage for brands.

Conversant has been focused on ensuring the highest ad quality for clients since day one. In the US, we offer an Ad Quality Guarantee, which guarantees client campaigns will meet or beat the industry standards across brand safety, viewability and fraud prevention, as measured by Integral Ad Science.

In the EU, our approach to ad quality – as well as personalization, incrementalit, and measurement – will remain scalable when GDPR goes into effect. We are committed to aligning our business practices with the GDPR policies and are strategizing to ensure we are providing industry leading best practices to help safeguard both Conversant and its clients.

MTS: How does Conversant enable brands to deliver unique and relevant messages to individuals at scale?
Agatha: Delivering unique and relevant messages to individuals at scale requires a combination of the right data and the right technology. Conversant leverages unprecedented amounts of consumer data, supplemented by machine learning, to reach the right consumer on the right device and at the right time, and deliver a personalized message on behalf of our clients. We do this by focusing on four key areas, which must work together in concert to generate the highest performance and provide the greatest benefit to brands:

Recognition and reach – In order to deliver personalized and relevant messages to individuals, marketers need to be able to recognize their customers across every digital touchpoint, which has become increasingly difficult with the proliferation of devices. Conversant helps clients recognize and reach consumers across their multiple devices with 96% cross-device matching accuracy, compared to an industry average of 50%.

Individualized profiles – Conversant’s understanding of consumers begins with our network of completely anonymized transactional data (both online and offline) of more than 4,000 retailers. Then, from the 86 billion online cross-device interactions that Conversant observes every day, we build comprehensive individual profiles for every customer across more than 7,000 dimensions – including web browsing, app usage, video plays, email activity, cross-screen engagement, life events, hobbies, ad interactions and product interests. These profiles are continuously enriched with every customer-brand interaction and allow our clients to grow a life-long relationship with their customers. Given consumers’ online and offline activity is always changing, maintaining a persistent connection is crucial to understanding their evolving needs and interests. Our ability to maintain a persistent connection with consumers over time enables our clients to have ongoing conversations with them for years.

Decisioning and delivery – Brands are faced with an infinite number of decisions about how to best interact with their customers all day, every day. For example, which creative should be displayed in a digital ad for customer A, and how should that differ for customer B? After a consumer makes a purchase, when is the optimal time to send another message and on which channel? When a customer visits a retailer’s website, how can the content be customized according to that customer’s interests upon arriving to the homepage? We remove the guesswork for our clients by making these decisions for them. Every day Conversant makes over a trillion real-time decisions about billions of interactions. Each decision is tailored to each person, and it’s made in just milliseconds across 1.1 million websites and on 173,000 mobile apps. This allows our clients to speak to their customers in the optimal way at exactly the right moment.

Measurement and insights – The ability to deliver personalized and relevant messages ultimately needs to lead to performance. At Conversant we use closed-loop measurement – a.k.a. the ability to connect every interaction with a customer to online and offline sales – to help clients understand how their programs are performing. We focus on measuring incremental return on ad spend (iROAS), so for every ad dollar spent, clients can understand their incremental return on investment across all channels. This ultimately allows them to see how digital advertising is impacting their bottom line.

MTS: What are the common operational and technical obstacles to personalization and how does your team address them for clients?
Agatha: To ensure we can observe and learn from every customer interaction across all channels and devices, we ask clients to tag every digital touchpoint. This could seem overwhelming at first, but Conversant’s tagging solution is extremely flexible and easy to implement. We can integrate with clients’ existing tag managers or provide our own in-house solution for clients who don’t already have one. Our goal is always to make it as easy as possible for clients to provide the data we need, and my team provides support and guidance every step of the way.

We also get questions from clients about privacy and security, particularly when it comes to sharing their offline transactional data. Privacy and security are extremely important to our organization and we have frameworks in place to ensure they are at the forefront of everything we do. Conversant has the ability to recognize individuals, assemble profile information, take action and measure in real-time, without using any personally identifiable information (PII). To ensure consumer privacy is always protected, all PII is removed from customer data before it enters our systems.

MTS: How does Conversant deliver full visibility into a marketing campaign’s ROI, broken down by various touchpoints?
Agatha: Conversant provides full transparency into media delivery and performance. We provide impression-level data showing how each media impression is linked to a specific customer profile, as well as transaction-level attribution data that links each conversion back to the impression that influenced it. When it comes to ROI, Conversant measures performance via a randomized test/control methodology including a messaged control, which provides full visibility into which customers are in the test and control group, and the impressions that are delivered to each one.

MTS: How do you see artificial intelligence/machine learning technologies disrupting the analytics involved in consumer cross-device matching and segmentation?
Agatha: There has been a lot of hype about the rise of artificial intelligence in advertising, which has partly been driven by recent successes such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and IBM’s Jeopardy master Watson. At Conversant, we have been leveraging this technology for clients for years. We make extensive use of artificial intelligence and machine learning as a part of the set of tools used to build the predictive models in our Core platform.

With the right scale, machine learning is absolutely a good thing – if not a must – for advertisers to enable cross-device matching, persistent connections with consumers, and more accurate audience segmentation. Not all companies have the technology or scale to do this. Conversant’s models make decisions in milliseconds and they do this constantly all day long. They also learn continuously, with every interaction or event adding a new piece of actionable information. The value of artificial intelligence and machine learning cannot be overstated, as they help clients learn about consumer behavior, understand their clients’ preferences, and ultimately drive the decisioning on the most optimal, personalized message delivered on the right device at exactly right time.

MTS: What is your roadmap for the future of personalization?
Agatha: Conversant is always looking ahead and finding ways to innovate and improve our offerings across our four core pillars: recognition and reach, individualized profiles, decisioning and delivery, and measurement and insights. Personalization is a holistic effort and all four of these areas must be fully optimized in order to be successful.

As companies increasingly embrace personalization, ensuring they can recognize and speak with the right consumers continues to be a priority. With that in mind, Conversant is expanding the touchpoints at which our clients can reach their consumers, including SMS, email, video and TV (OTT and smart TV). We know that consumers expect seamless brand experiences, so we are expanding our ability to continue the conversation from one touchpoint to another and tailor it to a consumer in real-time.

Measurement is another area of focus. We are developing products and capabilities that give clients greater visibility into the effectiveness of their digital marketing. Conversant has always been focused on generating incremental return on ad spend for clients, while continuing to prevent fraud and waste, and we know that our clients increasingly want to “feel” those efforts. We are providing more insight into the work being done on their behalf, using tools like cross-device attribution and media overlap reporting.

Lastly, more and more clients are asking for data portability, so Conversant is working on a new offering that will make that possible.

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

Interview with Judge Graham, Chief Marketing Officer, Ansira

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 14, 2017

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[mnky_team name=”Judge Graham” position=” Chief Marketing Officer, Ansira”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/Sq1Agency” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/judgegraham/ “]

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“If you don’t have the right infrastructure and architecture technologically, it is nearly impossible to implement campaigns in a successful way that reaches customers.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Ansira and how you got here? What inspired you to be part of a data–driven marketing intelligence company?
Previously, I was co-owner & President of Sq1, a data-driven advertising agency. I sold Sq1 to Ansira in late 2015, and now, I am the agency’s Chief Marketing and New Business Officer.

I love working in a very fast-paced environment, and being a part of this company allows me to work across a multitude of verticals and sectors. I’ve always been very intrigued with how we use data to inform, influence and reach customers — It’s fascinating.

MTS: How do data–driven marketing solutions help brands create and strengthen customer relationships?
Data-driven marketing solutions allow marketing to be very personalized and relevant to each customer. I think personalization is very important in today’s society — Customers want to receive information that is very relevant to them in their unique moments that matter. I think data has allowed us to do that, and it has completely reshaped marketing in a number of ways.

MTS: How do you see digital media planning strategies evolving with social media marketing playing a critical role in customer engagement?
The proliferation of social media is very evident in our daily lives. People are much more inclined to want to understand socially how brands fit into their lives — they read reviews, engage with tweets, use company hashtags.

Using data to drive informed digital media and social is a cornerstone of reaching customers, and it will continue to be. I think that people today trust social mediums more than they do other media avenues. Social is the new way to reach customers where and when they want to be reached.

MTS: What are the major challenges in connecting location data and behavioral data with marketing campaigns and customer experience?
The main challenge of connecting data and marketing is implementation. Everything is possible for an organization, but if you don’t have the right infrastructure and architecture technologically, it is nearly impossible to implement campaigns in a successful way that reaches customers.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Startups are just so unique, and I think it’s fascinating to follow their success and see them grow. Right now, I really like Tecovas; It’s a great up-and-coming handmade cowboy boot company in Austin.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
As a technology dependent agency, we use a multitude of technologies. We look at each individual campaign and analyze its strategy and solutions to pick the technology that works best. Each campaign is unique, so each one requires a different mix of technologies in order to reach its goal.

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign?
I would have to say our standout campaign is our work with Panera. We are continuing to implement and grow their loyalty program. The program has been a huge success for both us and Panera, and it continues to delight customers and connect with them in the moments that matter.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI–centric world as a marketing leader?
Everyone has to embrace AI — there’s no way around it. AI is here to stay, and it’s going to change the landscape of everything — the economy, the job market, and of course, how we execute marketing. AI is growing rapidly, and I believe things are going to become a lot more AI driven in as little as six short months. Companies need to prepare for an AI-centric world by employing analytical senior-level employees. AI will cause the whole world to change, and management must be able to understand and respond to its effects on day-to-day business.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Fast — That’s just how I operate. I believe in being efficient and getting things done as quickly as possible.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
I love Evernote. It’s a great productivity tool that helps me prioritize all of my tasks.

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Get up early. I think starting your day early allows you to be more productive throughout the entire day. If you start your day right, the rest will follow.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Right now, I’m listening to the audiobook of The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. It’s a great book about taking massive actions to reach success.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Never underestimate the level of effort it takes to be successful. Anything you get into, it’s always going to be much harder than you think, so always be prepared and operate with that mindset. If you think a project will take six months to complete, prepare for 24.

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

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Judge” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108ea084-6c6d”]

Judge Graham is the Chief Marketing Officer of Ansira.com and former co-owner & President of Sq1.com, which he sold to Ansira.com in late 2015. Judge helped drive Sq1’s growth and success on an accelerated level – creating a new paradigm of marketing, predictive modeling. Judge’s drive has grown Sq1’s client roster and substantially expanded existing client’s scope of work with leading prestigious brands including Michael’s, Jiffy Lube, Daikin and Papa Murphy’s. Under Judge’s lead, the Sq1 team has received many awards including Ad Age’s Best Places to Work, Dallas Business Journal’s Best Places to Work in North Texas and Inc. 5000’s list for 2014. Judge also designed the 34,000 square foot Dallas office that Mashable ranked as one of the most creative work spaces in the world. Judge has also won DMN 40 under 40 and has been profiled in AD Week.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Ansira” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108ea084-6c6d”]

Judge
We are the leader in modeling and activating 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data delivering performance marketing programs at a national and local level with unprecedented results and long-term profitability.

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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.

Nielsen Launches Marketing Budget Explorer Globally

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PRNewswire

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November 13, 2017

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Nielsen Enhanced Its Roster of Everyday Analytic Tools, With the Global Launch of Marketing Budget Explorer

Streamlining the media planning process, Nielsen‘s new media budget forecasting solution is an intuitive, web-based simulation tool that will enable brand marketers to easily evaluate thousands of combinations of marketing allocations and budget options, to make more informed, media planning decisions.

“For advertisers tasked with maximizing the impact of their limited marketing dollars, Marketing Budget Explorer simplifies a traditionally complex practice. Deciding which brands, channels, markets or even day-parts to execute against is neither an easy nor a light decision to make. Today, the stakes are higher, the need for dynamic decision making is greater and the ability to reduce wasted spend and increase ROI is a critical charge for all marketers,” said Lana Busignani, Head of Marketing and Sales Effectiveness for Lead Markets at Nielsen.

Also Read: Nielsen Agrees to Acquire Visual IQ

Nielsen’s database of marketing ROI studies show that the average return for marketing activities is only about $0.70per $1 spend, which means marketing efforts are getting back less than they are spending and brand teams are at risk of losing profit and marketing budget. Priming the market for a positive return, Nielsen’s Marketing Budget Explorer will help users optimize marketing budget allocations under various scenarios, predict outcomes, identify profitable paths to growth, look at budget allocations across different brands within a portfolio and easily change and test plans, anytime, anywhere.

Nielsen’s Marketing Budget Explorer is grounded by a sophisticated simulation and data engine that estimates the impact at any spending level. Results from Marketing Budget Explorer are supported by Nielsen’s robust suite of Marketing Mix and planning tools. The insights delivered are informed by benchmark data, based off of other brands in a similar category, powered by Nielsen’s proprietary benchmark database that consists of over 40,000 measured marketing results, globally. Also available, is the option to use results from Nielsen’s custom marketing mix studies that measure the impact of a brands’ marketing efforts on sales.

When used with benchmark insights, Marketing Budget Explorer is less resource intensive, making data-driven decisions highly accessible for smaller brands and markets that traditionally have had limited access to analytics. This newest offering continues Nielsen’s vision of making sophisticated analytics more accessible to brand marketers, executive decision-makers, insights teams and agency partners, for everyday decisions.

Busignani continues, “With the launch of Marketing Budget Explorer, we are putting the power of analytics into the advertiser or brand manager’s hands to help make marketing mix modeling data more accessible to key decision makers within companies of all sizes. Nielsen has brought to the market a steady stream of everyday analytic products, leading the drive to foster greater efficiency, growth, and automation around media budget allocation decision making. We are excited to bring this to the marketplace as a building block within our Connected System.”

Nielsen’s Marketing Budget Explorer will be launched on a rolling basis to all markets, globally. Currently, benchmark insights are available in the U.S, Canada and select global markets, including Australia, UK, France, Germany, and Spain.

dapulse Becomes monday.com to Reflect their Vision to Solve Work Challenges for All Teams

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MTS Staff Writer

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November 13, 2017

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The New Name Signifies The Company’s Broader Commitment To Spark A Dialogue On How To Improve Working Together As Humans

dapulse, one of the world’s fastest growing startups, announced it is renaming to monday.com. The new name signifies the company’s broader commitment to spark a dialogue on how to improve working together as humans. monday.com is a centralized platform for teams to manage every detail of their work, from high-level roadmap planning to the specifics of day-to-day tasks, while building a culture of transparency.

monday.com’s rapid growth, doubling in size every 5 months, is attributed to its unique breakthrough as the intuitive solution for teams of all types, including from non-technology sectors. What began as a tool for startup managers, evolved into a platform for anyone working together; ranging from two freelancers collaborating on a project to large teams working across a Fortune 500 company.

“In becoming monday.com, our vision is finally encapsulated in our name. I’ve never agreed with the term ‘Project Management’ because it isn’t really projects that we’re managing, it’s people. People are any company’s most valuable resource and as people, we all face the same workplace challenges. Naming our company monday.com represents our effort to solve those challenges. While we can’t tackle every problem our users face at work, we’re going to try,” Roy Mann, CEO and Co-founder, monday said.

Coinciding with the renaming, recent updates to the team management platform include a dramatically faster operating technology, ready-made onboarding templates for teams across a variety business verticals, and improved mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Also read: How monday.com Grew 350% in 2016

“We continue to be inspired by how teams use our platform in ways we never imagined. It is our brilliant and creative user community that helped us define what we’re here to do. As we grew, we refined our values and our voice. The only thing missing was a name that epitomized our transformation, until we found monday,” Eran Zinman, CTO and Co-Founder, monday said.

Since launching in 2014, monday.com has provided a fundamentally different way for teams to work together. monday.com is trusted by thousands of teams around the world including Adidas, the Boston Celtics, Discovery Channel, McDonald’s, NBC Universal, Samsung, Uber, and WeWork, among over 18,000 others.

The new name is effective immediately and will be implemented gradually across the platform throughout the remaining calendar year of 2017. To date, monday.com has raised $34.1 Million in funding.

monday.com is a team management platform designed to improve work processes and create an environment of transparency in business. As a web-based SaaS company, monday.com facilitates a more efficient and intuitive way to manage teams and entire operations. Investors include Insight Venture Partners, Entree Capital, and Genesis Partners. Headquartered in Israel, the tool is fully customizable to suit any business vertical and currently has over 18,000 paying teams around the world from over 140 countries.

TechBytes with Bartłomiej Romański, Chief Technology Officer, RTB House

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 13, 2017

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Bartłomiej Romański
Chief Technology Officer, RTB House

In November, RTB House, a global retargeting technology provider for top advertisers, announced the release of another deep-learning based breakthrough for marketers, which provides them with an ultra-precise way to estimate potential clicks on ads, yielding stronger ROI.We spoke to RTB House CTO Bartłomiej Romański, to find out the implications of this release.

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MTS: Tell us about your role at RTB House and the team you handle?
Bartłomiej Romański: As Chief Technology Officer at RTB House, I am responsible for building and developing our DSP (Demand Side Platform), which is an innovative tool for the buying and optimization of online advertising in the real-time bidding model. I am planning the long-term strategy for the IT department and building the team who is creating our product. Currently, I have 50 programmers on board. In the past year and a half alone we managed to leverage the potential of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and fully implement it into our solution.

By using deep learning technology — processing models inspired by the biological neurons in our brains — we make it possible to get more reliable, richer, machine-interpretable user profiling of customers’ buying potential. With 100 percent of our algorithms based on deep learning components, we bring our clients a new wave of efficiency to their online activities.

We’re taking a note from other industries, like travel, where a long list of metrics are taken into consideration and user purchasing patterns are dynamic and difficult to predict. In such cases, algorithms powered by deep learning can better react to user needs. It’s a vast improvement over other methods typically used in retargeting.

MTS: How does RTB House envision sophisticated remarketing scenarios to ensure full-ROI on personalized marketing?
Bartłomiej: The implementation of deep learning into our technology allowed us to increase ROI for our clients. AI has the capabilities to run and optimize a campaign to achieve the best results. However, sometimes our clients have other goals than just increasing sales, for example boosting traffic on e-store apps or supporting cross-selling efforts. This is where we can provide different scenarios to answer their individual needs.

To give you an example in the fashion industry, we can direct different creatives, messaging and tactics for different categories like women’s clothes or men’s clothes. Here again, travel has many examples of more complicated business strategies.

For example, the client’s first goal is to sell first-class flight tickets, but the second goal is to effectively advertise car rental offers to travelers so they decide to package them together. In these scenarios, we are able to create advanced remarketing frameworks to increase the ROI and secure all other business goals.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Dennis Fois, President, NewVoiceMedia

MTS: What are the key components of your Product Recommendations Engine? How does the engine create dynamic personalization based on a user’s impression history?
Bartłomiej: The new recommendation engine is using deep learning to make decisions about what a user is most likely to click on, browse or buy. It is difficult to present all elements which AI is considering while making decisions about what to display and to whom, but to simplify let’s look at the main components.

First, it looks widely on the user behavior in the e-shop. By scanning elements such as views and how much time was spent in different categories etc., it builds individual user buying behavior profiles.

Secondly, the profile is integrated with all the data observing how the user reacted to online ads, such as clicks or product views. Additionally, it uses technology also referred to as computer vision, allowing for automated extraction, analysis and understanding of information from a single image or a sequence of images. It looks for similarities between products researched by potential buyers.

Of significance to mention is that the new product doesn’t need to have buying history to be recommended. The recommendation engine will recognize it and will know that it may be of interest to the customer, and will made a purchase suggestion. Looking at the clicks and traffic from clients, we found that users clicked on ads up to 41 percent more than usual with our new deep learning recommendation engine over the common approach. Growth is noted especially in sectors such as: fashion and multicategory e-shops, where the possibilities to use cross-categories recommendations are almost endless.

Also Read: Dreamforce Techbytes with Joe Hyland, Chief Marketing Officer, ON24

MTS: What’s the next frontier for remarketing platforms in an ecosystem that is driven aggressively by Programmatic + AI technologies?
Bartłomiej: In my opinion, AI is giving us endless possibilities and it will determine all our future efforts. The best example of how much further deep learning can be developed is AlphaGo, the computer program created to win Go, one of the most difficult logic games in the world. The first version of AlphaGo was launched in 2014. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated South Korea’s grandmaster, Lee Sedola. Sedola managed to win only one round. In May 2017, the next win for the program was announced – in a three to zero defeat, AlphaGo triumphed over Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie.

However, all these versions of AlphaGo needed significant human assistance to reach a level that would allow them to defeat the grandmasters. The latest version, AlphaGo Zero practiced playing from the beginning alone, omitting the human factor. In this way, the program quickly surpassed the level of human players and defeated the previous version of AlphaGo 100 to 0. Imagine what it could signify for our industry and how much we can enhance our technology powered by AI. For this reason, we have focused our efforts to be one of the first retargeters to use 100 percent deep learning technology. We are excelling in the space and are continuing our focus on increasing the effectiveness.

MTS: What would Performance Marketing objectives look like in 2020, as remarketing platforms promise to deliver high-campaign ROI on every device?
Bartłomiej: I would say that in the near future we can focus on improving the dialogue between robots and humans. By looking to the use the data available online, our technology will be able to precisely understand users and answer their needs. This will make online shopping more user-friendly and faster. Imagine that someone is browsing for a new TV. AI will make recommendations that the customer has never seen before, but that still have the features required. Isn’t this better than spending hours on research, finding the best offer and then considering the purchase decision?

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

Interview with Dvir Doron, Chief Marketing Officer, Cedato

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 13, 2017

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[mnky_team name=”Dvir Doron” position=” Chief Marketing Officer, Cedato”][/mnky_team]

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

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“When applied to video, header bidding makes it possible for publishers to monetize more efficiently than ever before.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Cedato and how you got here? What do you enjoy most about being in video adtech?
I joined very early on following an impactful meeting I had Ron Dick, Cedato’s CEO. At the time I was busy working on my own project, but Ron’s positivity, passion and overall vision for the company’s future intrigued me. It seemed like an industry-changing idea and a great opportunity so I decided to come aboard. It was clearly the right move and I thoroughly enjoy my current position (Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer), which allows me to strategically contribute to several aspects of Cedato’s marketing and business development plans.

It’s a great time to be in the industry and I’m impressed by how quickly the space is evolving, particularly right here in Israel. Tel Aviv has emerged as an epicenter for some of the most dynamic and innovative video adtech solutions in the world.

MTS: How does Cedato power video transactions in a native ad marketplace?
Cedato has truly created a new model in the video advertising space. Our SaaS solution is designed to run omnichannel video programmatically to maximize value, monetization, and engagement for publishers. By providing the necessary infrastructure to run high-impact video across all formats and platforms, we’re able to give publishers an easy way to reduce latency and optimize yield from demand sources.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

MTS: What are the disruptive forces in the contemporary video adtech space?
Video advertising continues to evolve, in part due to its increasing popularity. The advent of header bidding particularly has been a game changer for our industry in the way it levels the playing field for publishers. When applied to video, header bidding makes it possible for publishers to monetize more efficiently than ever before.

Some have dismissed it as a ‘publisher hack’ but I see header bidding becoming an industry standard over time. It offers transparency and evens the playing field for everyone.

MTS: How should publishers determine if they need to rely on cross-channel Video OS?
In the past couple years the video space has shifted so much, which can be challenging for publishers to adapt to. There are several factors that contribute to the key decisions they face, including the myriad of screen options, the changing landscape of programmatic, advent of video header bidding, and the overall consumer shift to a mobile-first world. The accumulated effect of this is the publisher’s growing need for a modern stack, which gives them a more seamless way to handle these new changes.

Historically, video has represented the biggest revenue opportunity, and I think every publisher needs to carefully review how to maximize this.

MTS: Do you see programmatic video monetization platforms maturing enough to create fresh revenue streams for publishers?
Definitely. The market is constantly evolving, and publishers are gaining more power to monetize than ever before. Combine this with the rise of native and outstream, and there are now so many new inventory opportunities for publishers to maximize yield performance. But they must proceed with caution and be wary of solutions that aggravate users and negatively affect their viewing experience.

MTS: What tools does your publisher tech stack consist of?
We’ve built the tech stack with mid-sized publishers in mind, and it includes everything publishers need to run modern video programmatically. Cedato’s tech stack includes an intelligent, lightweight cross-screen player that can deliver ads to any device and unique outstream video units all within an open and customizable API.

Also within, a video ad server that’s powered by predictive algorithms and our hybrid video header bidding engine, and a self-serve UI that allows for seamless access, management and control. We’re pleased with the progress of this product, which provides publishers an easy to implement solution that takes into account the technology gap and budgetary constrictions many of them face.

Also Read: Why the Ad Fraud Fight Needs a Global Approach

MTS: What are your thoughts on the AI revolution in adtech and how is your company preparing for a more AI-centric marketing world?
AI is somewhat of an overused term at this point, but it’s hard to discount the tremendous impact it has had on the advertising industry. Advances in machine learning have enabled executives to take the guesswork out of their jobs with the ability to contextualize ads to users based on specific insights into their search and consumption habits.

The vast amounts of data today’s marketers have at their disposal will make for a more efficient industry, reducing waste that comes from ads that are missing their intended targets.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Value. I focus on what generates the most value/contribution.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Apart from the usual set of Google apps, I live by Asana, a great task management tool, and by Hubspot, helping me get my bearings on all our marketing and sales efforts.

MTS: What other startups or technology platforms are you watching/keen on right now?
Analytics/BI, and obviously everything that’s happening on the video space.

MTS: Do you have a work-related shortcut or productivity hack to share with our audience?
I live by David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) method, at least I try to. I recommend his 2-minute rule on deciding how to handle a new task/email – if you can get this done quickly (like within 2-5 mins) just do it right now. If not – process this for later. This helps me streamline my day, being responsive to others and also not letting external interruptions manage my time completely.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (Or what news sources do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Just finished reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. An inspiring review of where our device and data-obsessed culture is leading us.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Embrace volatility. It may sound straightforward, but it really isn’t. We all have an innate resistance to change and I try to be as flexible as possible.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Evan Spiegel.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Dvir” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108ed748-a003″]

Results-oriented executive with 18 years of broad leadership experience in business, marketing and strategy roles, leveraging strong execution skills and a track record of driving successful business transformations, ranging from start-ups to publicly traded global corporations.

Entrepreneurial and hands-on, combining vast traditional marketing experience (product, channel, branding, comms) and digital know-how (online advertising, social, mobile, lead gen, inbound marketing, automation) into a unique integrated marketing approach and best practices. Broad experience online and offline, in the Video, Media+Adtech and HLS spaces, with software and hardware products, enterprise solutions and large-scale services.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Cedato” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108ed748-a003″]

Cedato Cedato powers digital video transactions. Cedato’s open operating system for video delivers native video across any screen and placement. We enable publishers and marketers to transform viewing experience across mobile, web and TV, lifting engagement supply and business results. Our predictive programmatic software and private marketplace power 15B video views across 1 million sites, with a disruptive SaaS-based model, helping leading industry publishers and advertisers to automatically lift engagement, supply and business results. Founded in 2015, Cedato is based in New York and Tel Aviv. For more information, visit www.cedato.com

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

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

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

Millennials Are Causing a Sales Revolution

By

Gabe Larsen

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November 12, 2017

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Millennials Are Causing a Sales Revolution

I’m a millennial, and I’m proud of it.

If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of us out there. According to Nielsen, millennials now make up one-quarter of the US population with a total of 77 million. We’re starting to take over the workforce as well with an estimated 35 percent of the workforce being millennials by 2020. We’re here to stay.

I’ll be the first one to admit we bring some good qualities and some bad qualifies. One thing is for sure—millennials don’t put up with crap. Some people think we’re lazy, but it isn’t true. We’re just efficient.

Efficiency guides our lives, and that’s why millennial sales reps are starting a revolution. We’re sick and tired of being efficient at home while the sales workplace makes little to no progress.

Here are some typical questions about efficiency (some rhetorical, some not!) that millennial sales reps ask themselves every day:

I’ve got Nest to manage my apartment’s climate control, Vi for my workout, and Spotify for my music. I’m a living example of how automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance our lifestyle. Why can’t it be the same at work?
When I look over my list of accounts and contacts at work, am I really supposed to guess which ones I should focus on? Why can’t the system recommend them to me?
Why do I have to guess which communication method people are most likely to respond to?
Why are one-on-one meetings with my manager so subjective? Couldn’t I receive real-time feedback about how I’m doing based on actual data?
As for hiring, couldn’t our company have an objective method for hiring that improves our chances of getting top performers?
When will the CRM empower me versus me always empowering it?

Let me give you an example—one that I’ve witnessed from one of my own sales colleagues. Jackson (not his real name) gets in the office at 8:30 a.m. and tries to prospect to keep his sales pipeline full. His colleagues tell him “cold calling is dead,” so Jackson tries not to make phone calls when he doesn’t know who might answer on the other end. Because of this, he spends roughly five minutes per contact searching online to learn more about the person and the company.

Also Read: How to Find the Right AI Platform for B2B Marketing and Sales Success

Jackson doesn’t know if it’s better to email, call, or send social messages to a prospect. He just knows that he prefers to email because he believes no one likes to get random phone calls. As a result, Jackson spends a considerable amount of time writing emails, trying to make them personalized and relevant to each person. He’s heard this is a best practice, and since it feels right, he runs with it.

Jackson occasionally makes phone calls, but the phone numbers are often wrong, and it takes him a lot of time to try to find the right one—so often he ends up just calling the main phone number for the company.

Confused that work is so far behind his personal life in terms of using automation and AI, Jackson often goes home frustrated.

Rather than read this and be surprised at how millennials lead their lives, look at the elephant in the room. Millennials are not stupid; they know when something is broken, and sales is fundamentally broken. Try all you want to have millennials do things your way—the traditional way. I’ll tell you right now, however: if it doesn’t work, millennials won’t keep doing it.

How about we empower millennials rather than forcing them, join them instead of fighting them? The sales revolution is happening now. Are you ready?

Also Read: How Key Customer Loyalty Drivers Have Changed Over the Last Decade

Conversica Voted Best Salesforce App at Dreamforce 17

By

prweb

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November 11, 2017

0

Industry-Leading Conversational AI Company Wins Salesforce Mega Demo Jam Competition This Week

Conversica, the leader in conversational AI for business, announced having won the Salesforce Mega Demo Jam competition at Dreamforce 17. Of the thousands of apps on the Salesforce AppExchange and of those select few invited to compete at this year’s marquee event, Conversica’s AI Sales Assistant was recognized by the most important judges – Salesforce users – as the best.

Over the course of Dreamforce 17, Salesforce partners competed in multiple Demo Jam rounds, which culminated in a final showdown yesterday. Finalists had three minutes to present a real-time demo of their app, and Conversica led the field of competitors to be named the Dreamforce 17 overall winner.

“The Demo Jam was tough—we faced stiff competition and prevailed in the semi-finals and then really had to bring our ‘A’ game for the final Mega round. Every competitor’s product was a clear winner, so we are especially honored to take home the trophy,” said Carl Landers, CMO of Conversica. “While our demo team really rocked it at Dreamforce 17, we owe our victory to all of the Conversica employees who made this success possible.”

As Demo Jam judges observed, Conversica’s AI Sales Assistant follows up with leads and contacts from CRM and marketing automation systems like Salesforce. The assistants use a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to engage incoming leads in natural, human-like conversations to qualify them for sales. Salespeople, freed from the time-consuming task of contacting and qualifying leads, can better invest their time advancing and closing opportunities—and can do so using Salesforce Einstein’s complementary AI capabilities, including proactive notifications, predictive scoring and task automation.

In September, Conversica demonstrated its AI-powered sales assistant to thousands of marketing and sales organizations at INBOUND, HubSpot’s annual conference in Boston. Conversica is sponsoring the event, billed as the largest conference in the world dedicated to advancing the inbound marketing methodology.

Also read: Interview with Carl Landers, CMO, Conversica

Unveiling Artsai, The First Artificial Intelligence Solution to Consolidate the Marketing Stack

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 10, 2017

0

Artsai web — Unveiling Artsai, The First Artificial Intelligence Solution to Consolidate the Marketing Stack

Self-funded by Serial Entrepreneurs and ex-NativeX exec, The Already-Profitable Company Uses Artificial Intelligence To Learn Across Platforms And Eliminates The Need For Disparate Marketing Vendors

Artsai has announced that it is coming out of stealth mode to unveil the first and only platform that uses artificial intelligence technology to consolidate the marketing stack for brands and publishers so they can leverage previously siloed data insights and optimize the entire customer lifecycle journey for dramatically increased efficiency.

Artsai, which already counts brands like Lyft and Pandora as customers, has not raised any venture capital and is already generating eight figures in annual revenue.

Currently, Artsai is operating as a pioneering company that uses artificial intelligence to optimize the entire customer lifecycle journey and consolidate the marketing stack. The company is led by Yuri Khidekel, a serial entrepreneur, and Erik Lundberg, a martech veteran. Prior to founding Artsai with his own money and serving as CEO, Khidekel founded and sold two other technology companies, and also served as the CTO of Identix and the EVP of Bioscrypt. Lundberg, Chief Revenue Officer, previously served as VP and GM at nativeX (acquired by MobVista), founded AddRev, and led revenue for Kleiner Perkins-backed pogo.com, which was acquired by EA.

Adaptive Marketing Automation: The Power of One-in-All Marketing Technologies

According to research by Forrester, brand marketers are currently juggling an average of five to ten disconnected marketing technologies and vendors. This creates major inefficiencies and increases costs, while decreasing campaign performance, and revenue.

At the time of this announcement, we spoke to Yuri Khidekel, CEO at Artsai to dive deeper into the idea behind launching the company.

Yuri explained, “There’s a huge oversaturation in the marketing industry, with each one of the more than 5,000 companies in the ecosystem. Brand marketers are currently juggling an average of five to ten disconnected marketing technologies and vendors. Artsai is a 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.”

Artsai is uniquely consolidating and disrupting the martech industry by vertically integrating the current piecemeal model with artificial intelligence. Artsai’s adaptive marketing automation platform is the first and only solution that uses artificial intelligence to address the whole user digital journey and make the entire marketing stack efficient, rather than focusing on incremental improvements to ad performance.

What would Artsai look like in 2020?

We asked Yuri about the future roadmap for Artsai in a heavily invested AI-enabled customer journey analytic market. Yuri had wise words to say. He said, “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 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.”

Even customers agree to the CEO’s vision.

Brian Mikalis, SVP of Monetization at Pandora, said, “Artsai is the marketing technology that we’ve been looking for.”

Currently, 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.

Yuri mentioned that Artsai’s technology is a potent option to study and optimize the entire customer lifecycle. The AI-enabled technology adapts automatically as the user travels through the various stages of their journey.

Brian added, “Previously, our marketers spent most of their time going back and forth between multiple platforms trying to reconcile them with each other. We were surprised to find out just how inefficient this process was when we started using Artsai. With Artsai’s complete end-to-end platform, we’ve been able to monetize and understand customers better with hyper-personal creative and data optimization, while reducing our customer acquisition and re-engagement costs.”

Artsai’s patent-pending adaptive marketing automation technology is powered by an interconnected artificial intelligence marketing stack and performs multiple marketing tasks including new customer acquisition, user retention, retargeting, re-engagement, app monetization and content optimization. The entire customer lifecycle is optimized as a whole as the user travels through the various stages of their journey and interacts with digital properties. 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, maintaining a hyper-relevant consumer conversation consistent with the customer’s previous engagements with the brand.

By consolidating several marketing functions into one streamlined platform, Artsai optimizes creative and content for each individual user as they move through every step of the customer journey. This allows marketing to be smarter, more effective, and ultimately more cost-efficient. Artsai’s customers include iconic brands like Pandora, Lyft, Wish, Match, TurboTax and King. Headquartered in San Francisco, Artsai was founded by Yuri Khidekel and Erik Lundberg.

Twitter Debuts First-Ever #HolidayIsHappening Insights Campaign

By

PRNewswire

-

November 10, 2017

0

Weekly, Digestible Twitter Insights to Be Powered by Brandwatch, Starting With #HolidayIsHappening

Twitter is partnering with leading social intelligence company, Brandwatch and Cheddar live news network, to keep holiday enthusiasts up to date on what’s hot and what’s not this season, with #HolidayIsHappening.

Brandwatch will be analyzing the real-time, holiday purchasing conversations across various industries like consumer tech, auto, and retail – among others, as well as the general holiday mentions on Twitter. Through this analysis, Twitter and Brandwatch will be able to identify this year’s most-wanted products, the brands who can expect the biggest holiday sales spikes and what moments will make this holiday season so memorable.

Also Read: Brandwatch Acquires Content Marketing Platform Buzzsumo

These insights will be brought to you live every Tuesday and Friday between 3 and 4 pm EST on Cheddar (@cheddar) with the #HolidayIsHappening newsdesk, and on Twitter itself with the #HolidayIsHappening chatbot via @TwitterMktg.

The newsdesk will premiere with a special launch edition tomorrow, November 9, with Twitter’s Global VP of Revenue and Operations, Matthew Derella, and Cheddar CEO, Jon Steinberg, discussing this season’s trends.

“We know that the holiday season is one of the biggest times of the year for marketers to make a big splash – and we also know that the holiday conversation is taking place on Twitter. Through Brandwatch, we’ll be able to take a deeper dive into what’s happening in real-time to unveil what people are talking about during the biggest moments of the holiday season,” said Matthew Derella, VP Global Revenue and Operations at Twitter.

In addition to the most buzzed about brands and products, Twitter and Brandwatch will also be sharing the consumer insights and trends garnered from the real-time discussions around tentpole holiday moments, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Snap Inc Acquires Metamarkets To Boost Snapchat Ad Data Analytics

By

Shalaka Nalawade

-

November 10, 2017

1

Snap Inc, the Parent Company of Snapchat, Has Reportedly Acquired Metamarkets for the Programmatic Ad Data Analytics on Their Popular Social Media App

Snap Inc is said to have acquired ad tech start-up Metamarkets, according to industry experts.

Metamarkets offers data tools to some major names in media and programmatic advertising like Twitter, Oath, Applift, and so on.

According to TechCrunch, citing anonymous sources, the technology and social media company most probably closed the deal to acquire Metamarkets for under $100m. The deal is not official yet. Instead, the sources told TechCrunch that they had received a stock alert about the acquisition and that the transaction was below $100 million.

Also Read: Oh Snap Inc.! It’s outta control.

Interestingly, the source cited by Techcrunch also revealed that Metamarkets was already profitable. This piece of information comes on the heels of the rumors that the start-up might have been on a shortlist of potential companies Snap Inc was looking to acquire.

According to industry experts, Snap Inc had been desperate to revise its advertising, given that the company has been busy expanding its ad network and revenues stood at $181 million last quarter.

The Techcruch report also mentioned that the deal is a part of Snap’s ongoing efforts to build out its advertising business. “Last quarter, the company reported revenues of $181.6 million largely from advertising, missing analysts’ projections,” said the report, adding, “A couple of weeks ago eMarketer revised its forecast for Snap’s overall ad revenues to $774 million, down from its previous estimate of $1 billion, in part because of slowing user growth. (Snap also reported slowing daily active user numbers for Snapchat last quarter, which as of August stood at 173 million.)”

Mobile Marketing reported that many marketers are still reluctant to hedge their bets with advertising on Snapchat. “With the introduction of more tools, Snap can tempt more marketers to take the plunge and, at the same time, encourage those already advertising on its platform to spend more. The acquisition revelation follows the introduction of a cross-platform conversion tracking tool on Snapchat, enabling marketers to track people across mobile, tablet and desktop owned online environments,” said the report.

The Fight Against Fraud: Are You Throwing Good Traffic Out with the Bad?

By

Rich Kahn

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November 10, 2017

0

The Fight Against Fraud: Are You Throwing Good Traffic Out with the Bad?

You know when you hear those pharmaceutical commercials for drugs with potential side effects that sound worse than the diseases they are trying to cure? Sometimes the fight against ad fraud is reminiscent of that.

Digital ad fraud is a real and growing threat. By 2025, global ad fraud will reach an estimated $50 billion, according to the World Federation of Advertisers. Advertisers, agencies and publishers obviously have to take steps to protect against ad fraud, otherwise they will waste a greater number of ad dollars on worthless impressions. The mistake they make, though, is failing to understand the potential downsides of these tools, and to test and compare different solutions.

For leading brands and agencies, it is basically a given that they will partner with a name-brand ad verification solution. (This is advertising, after all. Brand cachet matters.) The thing is, these solutions aren’t always effective, and in the worst cases, they can actually do more harm than good.

The Risk of Oversimplifying

Determining whether traffic is fraudulent is complicated. Often, ad verification companies focus on one or two key metrics, such as viewability or nonhuman traffic (NHT). While this makes it easier for advertisers to understand how the solution works, it also makes it easier for the bad guys, who are continually developing tactics to beat the system. Fraudsters are fully aware of how the industry measures traffic quality, and they know what they need to do to circumvent fraud prevention and detection tools.

Let’s pick on viewability for a moment, an important concept for reasons beyond fraud. Leading advertising organizations, i.e., ANA, 4A’s and IAB, worked together to define what counts as a viewable impression, the goal being to ensure advertisers aren’t paying for ads that were never seen. But who cares if your ad was viewed if it wasn’t a human who viewed it?

While more nascent fraudsters may build bots that show their hand with suspicious patterns, such as clicking too quickly, sophisticated criminals know how to design scams that appear legitimate and satisfy the industry’s viewability criteria.

Also read: Why the Ad Fraud Fight Needs a Global Approach

The Problem with Percentages

Many ad verification solutions use probability statistics to rate the likelihood of a user being fraudulent. But what should an advertiser do if a user is 70 percent likely to be bad? How about 50 percent? There is no definitive answer—you might as well flip a coin. It is up to the advertiser to determine its level of risk tolerance.

When advertisers focus on super-clean, premium traffic, they throw out some good impressions with the bad and can end up spending more to drive the same results. Imagine you’re using a solution that scores traffic on a scale of one to 100. Traffic with a rating of “one” is definitely bad whereas traffic rated 100 is super high-quality. Now picture a triangle. At the top is the 100-rated traffic. There is not a lot of it. At the bottom of the triangle is the worthless traffic. There is plenty of that. No one wants the bottom-of-the-triangle, garbage traffic. Everyone wants what is up top, but there is only so much to go around, and the high demand drives up prices.

Also Read: Trust and Transparency Took Center Stage at Advertising Week New York

Focus on Performance

So, what is the solution? First, marketers need to understand the potential shortcomings of ad verification software. They are doing their best to measure the legitimacy of an impression, but no solution is perfect, and the bad guys are really good at what they do. That means marketers need to work harder. As much as they would love a “set and forget” solution, they have to be prepared to test out their strategies. Don’t rely on a tool’s reputation. Compare it to others.

To test ad verification solutions, measure traffic performance by monitoring something more verifiable than an impression: conversions. If the ad fraud solution is working, the traffic it sanctions should perform well, or at least in line with historic benchmarks. If fraudulent impressions are sneaking through the system, or if good traffic is being filtered out, that will affect the conversion rate.

Although surprising, it’s not a given that brands and agencies test out an ad verification tool before they purchase it. It does require more upfront work for marketers, but it’s worth it. Marketers will know they have a strategy they can trust—at least for a while. Ad fraud is fluid, so the defense needs to be, too.

Also read: The State of Ads.txt: Not a Big Clean-up Yet

For instance, P&G and JPMorgan Chase, two well-endowed brands, recently called for a review of their digital marketing efforts. P&G cut more than $100 million in largely ineffective digital ads without making much of an impact to their bottom line, and Chase vetted 400,000 websites where the company’s ads were running, only to determine a mere 5,000 were indeed ‘brand safe.’

Ad verification software is important and well-intentioned, but people have to understand how these tools work and not just choose one because they recognize its name. Then they can adopt better strategies and use anti-fraud tools the way they were intended – to help them spend their advertising dollars more effectively, and safely.

Don’t Be Late for the Party: Holiday Planning Starts Now!

By

Ryan James Dee

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November 10, 2017

0

With the kids back in school and summer behind us, it can only mean one thing—time to start planning for the holidays! “Wait! But the leaves only just started to change?” you might be thinking. I know, it seems early. But an early start can mean the difference between using the same-old, ho-ho-ho-hum specials and décor from last year and developing a truly unique and differentiated experience that surprises and delights customers—and keeps them coming back long after the holidays are over.

A well-planned holiday event typically takes anywhere from six to eight weeks, but more sophisticated events can take even longer. So, it’s always best start the process sooner rather than later.

The retail winter season, generally defined as the months of November and December, accounts for nearly 20 percent of annual retail industry sales in the United States, according to the National Retail Federation. With an estimated $800 billion at stake, it’s clearly in retailers’ and brands’ best interests to do all they can to help set themselves apart from the competition.

With “clicks” encroaching more on “bricks”, physical retailers really need to step up their game and turn their stores into destinations. Everyone’s going to do holiday circulars and slash prices, so to set yourself apart you have to provide an experience that’s different.

Non-Traditional Celebrations

One of the best ways to differentiate the shopping experience is to embrace non-traditional celebrations, in addition to the typical Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah. For example, Friendsgiving is a holiday that’s gained traction as an alternative or in addition to Thanksgiving.

Then there’s Chrismukkah—a mashup of Christmas and Hanukkah that started with the popular TV show The O.C. but has become a holiday people actually celebrate. Ways to activate around these, and other, alternative celebrations include pop-up shops, store-within-a-store concepts, and curated or holographic displays, just to name a few. And whatever you do, make it something people will want to share on social.

Get your shoppers involved and promote the creation of user-generated content with hashtags, photo ops or your own Snapchat filter. You can even host contests and sweepstakes via social to get your shoppers engaged to create even more content around their own unconventional traditions during the holidays.

Also Read: Holiday Planning Starts Early In Digital Advertising

Think Inside the Box

For those with a large array of merchandise, creating subscription-type sample boxes can be an ideal way to push holiday products. With personalization being de rigueur, you can go one step further and have shoppers curate their own sample boxes based on their tastes and preferences via a dedicated microsite. Naturally, you’ll want to add exclusive offers to encourage the purchase of the full-sized in your stores. And for an added holiday touch, double up on the samples in each box so shoppers can “gift” them to friends and family. Samples make perfect stocking stuffers!

The New Realities

Those with bigger budgets looking to truly make an impression might consider tapping into higher end technology to elevate the in-store experience. For a pretty small footprint in the store, you can integrate shoppable signage and geotargeted SMS offers into your store experience or create impressive branded virtual reality experiences. Imagine shoppers having virtual snowball fights in the middle of your store or them taking to the skies in Santa’s sleigh inside of a motion simulator with a VR headset.

Retailers can also develop augmented reality apps to invite shoppers take selfies with Santa or find hidden deals around your departments much in the same way players find Pokémon in the popular game. Another way to utilize augmented reality is with “magic” mirrors that allow shoppers to try on clothes or cosmetics without needing to spend the time and effort with the physical items.

Even though it might seem early to think about the holidays, the best chance to drive differentiation and sales around them is by starting preparations today.

Also Read: Strengthening Predictive Analytics with Intent Data

TechBytes with Christopher Golec, CEO, Demandbase

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 10, 2017

0

Christopher Golec
CEO, Demandbase

Demandbase recently launched the new-generation ABM platform, enabling B2B marketers to execute Account-Based Marketing effectively and easily. Promoted as a comprehensive, end-to-end ABM platform that lets you easily manage audiences of target accounts, measure the progress of those accounts and act on them across the entire funnel, the next-generation of Demandbase ABM has an Artificial Intelligence (AI) layer, which ensures an improvement in account identification rates. To dive deeper into Demandbase’s AI-powered ABM Platform, we spoke to CEO Christopher Golec, who dove into the nuances of Lead-to-Account matching and how AI/ML capabilities make ABM+CRM a killer-combination for B2B marketers.

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MTS: What are the key inclusions in the new Demandbase ABM platform?
Christopher Golec: For marketers, looking to implement an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, it can be challenging to stitch together a program with disparate technologies that don’t use a common data model or measure a business throughout the entire funnel and lifecycle.

The ABM Platform is the only comprehensive, end-to-end solution for B2B marketers.
The ABM Platform makes it easy to set up and manage account-based campaigns across the entire funnel.
It includes a self-service interface that allows marketers to select target accounts, manage audiences across campaigns, integrate account information from a CRM system, and measure the performance of ABM programs based on pipeline and revenue.

MTS: How deep has Demandbase run with leveraging Machine learning and semantic understanding for predictive lead scoring and segmentation?
Christopher: Demandbase has the most extensive AI technology in B2B, which grows by billions of B2B interactions every month. We currently have 25 employees on our data science team dedicated to pairing AI and machine learning algorithms with our B2B data to provide ABM solutions that can identify every B2B company in the world, map relationships between companies, generate useful insights, and deliver the right content to the right companies.

Most recently, we introduced Real-Time Intent, an AI technology that analyzes and tracks billions of B2B interactions every month to identify the first moment of a potential buyer’s interest. And now, with our ABM Platform, AI is integrated throughout the platform to enable a 100 per cent improvement in account identification rates for users. AI is part of our DNA and will continue to play an important role in how we innovate.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

MTS: Do you agree that B2B marketers still get entangled with “Lead-to-Account” matching? To what extent would the new ABM platform help such marketers?
Christopher: Yes, lead-to-account matching is still an area that trips up B2B marketers. At Demandbase, we have the largest B2B data asset along with sophisticated matching techniques that connect leads and accounts across advertising and martech ecosystems to your CRM, so that ROI can be measured across the funnel.

The ABM Platform offers a fully integrated targeting, engagement, and sales conversion solution, and serves as a single source for managing audiences of target accounts and measuring the progress of those accounts across the entire funnel.

MTS: In the battle of “Volume versus Quality”, how do you see the new ABM platform doing a balancing act for an effective CRM operation?
Christopher: For sales and marketing to be aligned, you always prioritize quality. The new ABM Platform provides sales and marketing with visibility into what’s working and what’s not, and which accounts are the highest priority.

Our ABM Platform offers an easy-to-use interface that builds target accounts directly from CRM data, making the process of building an account list and having an effective CRM operation even easier. Marketers can upload a preexisting account list from their CRM solution, or they can leverage buyer intent signals generated from our AI-powered platform, which learns from 50 billion B2B interactions every month. With these capabilities, marketers can further segment and manage audiences by a number of firmographic variables such as industry, size, location, and others.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Vinod Muthukrishnan, CEO, Cloudcherry

MTS: What’s the magical potion for ABM users while they build lifelong advocacy in a highly competitive MarTech ecosystem?
Christopher: The key to ABM is to align sales and marketing teams, including alignment on measurement. With ABM, it’s important to measure success at the account level from initial targeting all the way through to a closed deal. You can then have the flexibility to roll up those results up by territory, audience, and campaign.

Brandee Sanders, Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics at Blackline said, “Account-Based Marketing is focused on alignment and joined targeting efforts, so when you have multiple point solutions that don’t integrate intelligently, it can create unneeded complexity or holes in our Sales and Marketing strategy. Demandbase’s ABM Platform gives us an easy-to-use, integrated view into who we’re reaching, why we’re reaching them and how we’re engaging them, allowing us to quantitatively measure results and answer to core KPIs.”

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

Interview with Nathan Kontny, CEO, Highrise

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 10, 2017

0

[mnky_team name=”Nathan Kontny” position=” CEO, Highrise”][/mnky_team]

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

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“I think the whole hyperpersonalized message is a bit overhyped. What’s more important is actually trying to make messages more “personal.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a CRM company?
I’m the CEO of Highrise, a CRM tool that offers the simplest solution for tracking leads and managing follow-ups. We serve tens of thousands of customers worldwide, helping people follow up on their relationships rather than just work through a sales pipeline. Highrise supports sales, marketing, help desk efforts and more.

Highrise is a tool that 37signals, the makers of Basecamp, created and launched in 2007, then spun-off as its own company in 2014. When the founders of Basecamp asked me to lead Highrise and create a team to run it, I accepted the challenge because Highrise has been part of my toolset for years. I also had a ton of ideas on how to keep building and improving the simplest solution out there, which already had a passionate user base.

MTS: How should marketers leverage behavioral data and location analytics to hyperpersonalize email marketing?
For starters, don’t send the same email to everyone. The needs of someone who is in the process of setting up a Highrise account are different from the needs of someone being invited to participate in a Highrise account. That’s why we send different welcome messages.

However, I think the whole hyperpersonalized message is a bit overhyped. What’s more important is actually trying to make messages more “personal.” Most of us can smell how email is so robotic now, and we can spot the email templates from a mile away. I know I’m getting it because hyperpersonalized robots decided it’s time for me to receive it.

We differentiate by personalizing those emails every single day, changing our templates to include details about that very day. I talk about things like how my weekend was and what my three-year-old is up to lately.

Our customers are crazy about the personal welcome videos we send, using a tool called Bonjoro. We can’t send everyone this type of message all the time, but we try to fit in as many as we can, and the engagement is incredible.

Also Read: Interview with Javier de la Torre, CEO, CARTO

MTS: CRM platforms are focusing on delivering customized dashboards and reporting analytics on desktop and mobile screens. How do you see this trend impacting the CRM business by 2020?
Most CRM platforms look at other CRM platforms as their competition. However, according to a report from Software Advice, almost three-quarters of buyers (72 percent) are using manual methods (and an additional 5 percent are using nothing at all) to manage their CRM. Clearly, here’s other competition. It’s Excel, email inboxes, and paper notebooks.

Customized dashboards and analytics will affect CRM in 2020 if they allow people to see the benefit of leaving Excel. Is this report any better or easier to make than the one someone’s already making in Excel? If it is, then it will continue to be a boon, but these things need to stop being eye candy and truly replace the homegrown solutions people are creating.

MTS: How should CMOs plan their automation stack to benefit from predictive analytics and intent data solutions?
CMOs need to integrate data from all teams in the organization, so these automation efforts don’t sour their customers. Unfortunately, you see automation efforts over and over that don’t include data from support systems, email marketing, CRMs or people’s inboxes.

I just experienced an automation fail with a vendor I have used for years. I received an email from a salesperson asking me to set up a phone call to introduce me to their business. I didn’t respond. Then I got another follow-up message, so I emailed back to opt out because I’m already a customer. They apologized. A week later it happened again. What? All over again? Once more, I ignored it, until I got the same follow-up again. When I looked at the email headers, I found they discovered some other random email address of mine on the internet and they added it to this list. Now, I cringe telling people about this vendor I use. I would have highly recommended them before, but their use of scraping the web and automating out their spam has left a terrible taste in my mouth.

If CMOs want to plan out their automation, they have to be careful not to invite scenarios like this into their organizations. Are you sending someone who just canceled your service an email that says, “Welcome to our product?” Are you emailing a current customer, “Can we help you with anything?” when they are already thick in a problem with your support team?

MTS: What are your thoughts on bringing True Automation in Email marketing to maximize investment opportunities?
Repetition is critical to spreading your message – and that’s where email marketing automation comes in. Automated drip campaigns can educate users, new and old, about your product. These types of messages are essential, but there are two critical factors to you should include. One, don’t make your audience guess. And two, always add explicit calls to action.

With Highrise, we send out a series of emails to new users about how to get the most out of using it. Each of the emails are different depending on what role you play in your organization or what type of account you have. But a single email isn’t going to cut it. We’ve learned repetition in that drip campaign is necessary to keep us top of mind and help users understand what Highrise can do for them. The more you can segment and truly personalize these messages, the better.

MTS: What startups in the MarTech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
Heap Analytics – The tool captures everything, so we can pick out what’s important later. I’ve been incredibly happy with not having to pre-think everything to instrument for our analytics.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017? (If you don’t wish to name the vendors, you may choose to only suggest the categories you are using them for (Automation, email, video, SMS, collaboration, etc.))
Bonjoro is an interesting startup we use to send welcome videos to individual customers. You probably can’t scale that to an enormous number, but for the people who can get those videos, it’s a huge impact.

Our own product, Highrise, is also the core piece of our marketing stack. It combines our help desk, email marketing, and CRM into one product, which helps us avoid many of the pitfalls of using different products to communicate and manage communication with our customers.

Also read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Ed King, CEO, Openprise

MTS: Would you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
As I mentioned above, these welcome video messages we send have been a huge hit. I’ll let this tweet do the talking.

MTS: How do you prepare for an Artificial Intelligence-centric world as a business leader?
I have one of those Artificial Intelligence (AI) speakers at home. We’re constantly asking it for the weather, news and sports scores. But, it rarely works like I want it to. Even with things like autofill, I often end up in a situation where I have to type my full question into Google any way to get my answer.

Too much AI is like this right now. It’s sprinkled on top of anything that looks remotely like work. But, often it works against us.

Think about how many false positives there are in the spam folder in your email inbox. Or the ones that get through. It’s not perfect, and some of our greatest minds have been on the case for decades. An email inbox for most people needs AI to help sift through the spam or it would be untenable to use at all. However, there are plenty of situations that aren’t like your inbox; they don’t need AI to become useable. AI will be incredibly useful for situations that are shaky without them, but most scenarios that already work well often don’t need the hype.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Action. (Here’s one post on that: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3811-stuck-again.)

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
I can’t live without Draft, the writing software. (Fair warning, I made this. But I spend all day writing in it. I’d be in bad shape if this didn’t exist.)
And of course, Highrise. It’s open all day, running our business. From new business inquiries to interview requests, customer support to email marketing, it’s all in there.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Get yourself on more scheduled releases. Force yourself to publish one article a week. Or start slow with one newsletter every three weeks. Setting up a strict cadence like this will force you to be productive through the lows that are inevitable in your life and projects. And it will help scope down your projects so they ship instead of getting stuck in analysis. Parkinson’s Law says, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” If you give things unlimited time, they never end.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
A new book, “The Power of Moments” by Dan and Chip Heath, which comes out in October (I got an early copy). It’s a great analysis of how important it is to define and celebrate more moments in our lives.

I read everything. I make an enormous effort to get out of the typical business type books and pay as much attention to other industries and subjects. Sometimes it’s a biography of a poker player, the latest celebrity news from People and Vanity Fair, or a new research article from a psychology Ph.D.

To consume all this information, I practice speed reading. The key to doing it successfully isn’t reading faster, but becoming a better skim reader.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“Open up your mouth and ask.”

I loved playing basketball as a kid, but I didn’t make the team my freshman year in high school. My dad told me to ask the coach if he needed anyone to help with practices. I remember how scared I was. I was sweating everywhere and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Still I went in, and asked the coach. He was nice but declined.

That exercise stuck with me forever. I had nothing to lose; I didn’t get what I wanted, but I didn’t die from heartache.

This is exactly how I got my first deal at my first business. I emailed a guy and asked if he wanted to work with us. It turned out to be our first $30,000 deal, which is huge in the early stages of a startup. And it’s how I got Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, as an early advisor when I was at Draft, which turned into me taking over Highrise. There were so many opportunities because I opened my mouth and asked.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to see answered.
Oliver: Elon Musk.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Nathan” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108ef556-cd9e”]

The CEO of Highrise, CRM software for small businesses and a recent spin-off from Basecamp. I’ve been running my own businesses since 2005 when I was in the second batch of Y Combinator (I returned to Y Combinator in 2011 with a second company). I write about the intersection of news, psychology, science, and my own experiences as an entrepreneur. Work of mine has appeared in Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Basecamp’s publication Signal v. Noise. You should follow me on Twitter: @natekontny.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Highrise” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108ef556-cd9e”]

Join other small businesses managing over 100,000,000 leads with a simple people focused CRM that’s been around since the beginning. Highrise is the just right, more thoughtful way to track leads and manage follow ups in the office or on the go. Start with a free no risk 30 day trial and get rid of busy work and complexity with zero learning curve today! A ‘running record of who said what when and who sent what to whom ALL in one place’ tool above the rest.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

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

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

Dreamforce TechBytes with Jason Jue, Chief Marketing Officer, Triblio

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 9, 2017

0

Jason Jue
CMO, Triblio

Salesforce Dreamforce is one of the biggest software conferences in the world. In the run-up to this event, we unveil our special TechByte series featuring high-profile Dreamforce attendees and MarTech Champions. We spoke to Jason Jue, CMO, Triblio, to find out his expectations of the event.

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MTS: What does your agenda for Dreamforce 2017 look like?
Jason Jue: I’ll be joining a panel of CXOs on Wednesday morning. Our session will cover “What works and doesn’t in Account Based Marketing.” It’s a follow up to last year’s most popular ABM session, which was largely driven by Q&A surrounding “What is ABM?” We were lucky to have such an engaged audience and ended up extending the session for an extra 30 minutes to handle all the Q&A. I’m looking forward to another round of discussions about ABM this year, where we’ll dive deeper into more specific tactics, strategies, and areas in ABM. I’ll be focused on account based advertising.

MTS: Who are you keen to meet at Dreamforce 2017?
Jason: Michelle Obama

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Vinod Muthukrishnan, CEO, Cloudcherry

MTS: Tell us about the magic you create with Account Targeting and Web Personalization for ABM?
Jason: Magic happens not just with account targeting but with persona targeting within your most important accounts. Your personalized messaging is only as good as your ability to reach the people you’re trying to sell to. Effective targeting is foundational to any ABM strategy. It allows marketers to run personalized web campaigns, even when their target accounts only consist of unknown visitors. With the right metrics in place, marketers can gain visibility into early-stage research, direct them towards the most relevant content, and enable sales to prospect into these interested accounts with consistent and relevant messaging.

Web personalization makes account based advertising work. Ads will drive traffic to your site. But, most of the time that traffic bounces. It’s essential that the web experience is similar to ad messaging to increase engagement and conversions. If anonymous visitors don’t find what they are looking for they bounce.

MTS: How does Triblio help B2B teams overcome the deficiencies that cause Lead Generation collapse?
Jason: With leads, you’re focusing on individual people. However, an individual person does not make the decision to buy, in a B2B purchase. Teams do. If you put all your eggs in one basket with just one known contact, you don’t have a good chance of winning that account. This lead might not be in the right department or even in a qualified account. There are many factors that could cause this lead to fail to champion your product to closed-won.

With account-based marketing, we’re saying, don’t bank on individual leads. Instead, nurture the entire buying center. On average, 6.8 stakeholders are involved in a B2B purchase, and each of these stakeholders needs to be receiving consistent marketing and sales messaging.

However, more importantly, you might not even land that one lead. In today’s B2B buyer journey, it could take months for a prospect to fill out a form, if at all. According to our research into hundreds of thousands of client data points, 45% of prospects engaged with a vendor’s website 90 days prior to form fill. During these initial months of research, the lead-based model for demand generation has no solution. ABM does. SiriusDecisions coined this stage in the funnel “Active Demand,” where visitors from target accounts are showing interest but choosing to remain anonymous.

To engage with prospects early in the buyer journey, SalesLoft uses Triblio to deliver 1:1 messaging across web and sales campaigns to their tier 1 accounts. Rather than waste resources on chasing down leads that might not be qualified, SalesLoft’s marketing team identify personalizes the web experience for each target account, and can identify whether known or unknown visitors from target accounts are actively engaged with their content and campaigns. Then each morning, its sales team receives a report on target account engagement, which enables their reps to outbound at the point of interest with the right messaging. SalesLoft had Triblio up and running within weeks and saw a 2-3x lift in conversions.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Ed King, CEO, Openprise

MTS: What’s the next frontier for ABM advertising in B2B ecosystem?
Jason: Account-based advertising helps drive awareness.

However, pure account based advertising is not as effective as account ads tied to your web and sales campaigns. Click-through rates are low, so marketers can’t count on click-through activity to direct prospects to the right landing pages. When account based ads are paired with web personalization, the marketer paves an alternate path to the same destination. This pathing is called a view-through. It routes prospects who saw your ad, didn’t click but visited your website to the right messaging.

Winshuttle, an SAP enhancements provider, capitalized on view-through conversions to drive traffic in their target accounts. For each target segment, the marketing team personalized display ads, a landing page, and their homepage with the same messaging. This way, prospects who saw a display ad would receive the right messaging whether they clicked on the ad or visited winshuttle.com later, which was more often the case.

Winshuttle’s first account based advertising campaign with Triblio drove a 5.6x lift in traffic and a similar lift in conversions in their target accounts. It was a cross-sell campaign. Account based advertising tools like Triblio, can target personas in target accounts. So, they could deliver one message to the new department they were trying to target.

MTS: How do you see programmatic and AI/ML capabilities accelerating the growth B2B sales enablement and ABM platforms?
Jason: Right now, according to head-to-head comparisons with the competition, it has helped us to have the best data to recognize anonymous visitors to target accounts. This means that B2B marketers can do more ABM campaigns to more target accounts.

Also Read: Dreamforce Techbytes with Joe Hyland, Chief Marketing Officer, ON24

MTS: How should B2B marketing and sales companies plan their AI-adoption strategies for better trigger-based campaigns and sales outboarding?
Jason: Before technology is implemented, it is important to have a flexible process and an organizational culture that is adaptable to technological change. And, testing and learning new technology. That’s a certainty.

What’s uncertain is how AI will fully impact our future as it is such transformative technology.

How was that non-answer answer?

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jason.
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: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

Dreamforce TechBytes with Mike Fitzmaurice, VP, Workflow Technology at Nintex

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 9, 2017

0

Mike Fitzmaurice
VP, Workflow Technology at Nintex

Salesforce Dreamforce is one of the biggest software conferences in the world. In the run-up to this event, we unveil our special TechByte series featuring high-profile Dreamforce attendees and MarTech Champions. We spoke to Mike Fitzmaurice, VP, Workflow Technology, Nintex, to see how he views the event.

MTS: What’s the biggest attraction for you at Dreamforce 2017?
Mike Fitzmaurice: Every year, the biggest attraction for me is definitely the community. We are always in awe of the scope of the Salesforce customer, partner, and vendor base and the myriad things they do with it.

MTS: Based on past Dreamforce experience, what would be your key takeaway or tip for the event?
Mike: The Salesforce platform is flexible enough to be used for an ever-expanding set of business problems. Nintex itself releases Nintex Workflow for Salesforce as a prime example of that. But it’s been a very long time since Salesforce.com was about only customer relationship management.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Vinod Muthukrishnan, CEO, Cloudcherry

MTS: What do you think will be some of the biggest martech-related announcements at the conference this year?
Mike: The rise of low-code platforms (“clicks-not-code”) has been a major theme at Dreamforce this year. However, it falls short of the goal. It’s not enough to free people from coding like a developer – you have to free people from having to think like one. If all you do is eliminate code, you only gain some productivity from fewer typos and visits to StackOverflow. It’s not enough. Drag-and-drop solution design needs to look and feel like instructions you give to — or better still, a conversation you have with — an assistant. They need to be understandable to others — and also to you when you go back a few months later to improve on your previous effort. The goal is to be easy – and easy is harder than it looks.

Another significant theme has been how MyEinstein and predictive analytics will shape the future of work and collaboration. A problem owner needs to feel like a problem solver, not a damsel in distress. Plenty of tools – obviously including Salesforce and Nintex – are emerging to assist with this. But the days of begging IT to add your needs to their application backlog are gone. We have our own budgets and a literal universe of ready-to-use tools to solve our own problems. It’s great – but it requires a change of mindset. Prediction is wonderful, but alone it’s not enough. Fortunately, Salesforce gets this and loves partnering with companies like Nintex. We are extremely bullish on MyEinstein, and we can’t wait to work with it in a big way. Salesforce can automate discovery and inference, and Nintex will happily automate action and interaction triggered by every single thing MyEinstein identifies as important.

MTS: How has marketing technology evolved since Salesforce acquired SteelBrick?
Mike: Since the SteelBrick acquisition, no one is standing still, and the competition has been beneficial for everyone – especially marketers making use of these SaaS offerings.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Ed King, CEO, Openprise

MTS: Do you think a company like Nintex would improve the adoption of newer technologies for ABM, Customer Experience, and Content Management?
Mike: Yes, of course. Nintex extends the reach of any technology to a myriad of people, content, and processes. Those islands of functionality become connected and part of a bigger picture when they’re pressed into the service of an intelligent business process.

MTS: How do you see modern data companies coping with the imminent GDPR-induced disruptions?
Mike: The GDPR all but mandates that every company doing business with the European Union adopt some form of process automation. Sending a customer a report of all data they have on them? Providing a means to correct that data on request? A means to delete it when someone wants to be “forgotten”? Those are processes. Their ERP vendor alone can’t provide this, nor can their EFSS, CRM, or other LOB app vendor – because data on an individual is spread across many different systems. They’re going to need either a very elaborate policies-and-procedures document that shows employees how to handle those tasks manually, or intelligent process automation software that does those things for them. I know which one I’d choose.

Also Read: Dreamforce Techbytes with Joe Hyland, Chief Marketing Officer, ON24

MTS: Would you provide us your take on how AI-driven marketing may evolve in the coming years, and what it might look like by 2020?
Mike: We’re hitting the inflection point where AI is becoming usable. It’s packaged into services marketers and others can use. AI as a discipline will evolve in ways I can’t necessarily predict, but I can – with certainty – predict that marketers will spend the next two years making aggressive use of AI. They’ll make some mistakes – but they’ll have a lot more successes. AI makes customer intimacy scalable. We can’t not take advantage of that.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Mike.
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: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

Marketing Op’s Guide to GDPR Compliance

By

Ed King

-

November 9, 2017

0

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25, 2018, strengthens data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. It affects any company, including U.S. companies, which collect data or handle customer data containing EU citizen information. GDPR will impact virtually every business, especially companies in consumer Internet, ecommerce, AdTech, MarTech, SalesTech, HRTech, security, even the Internet of Things. Authorities can fine companies up to €20 million or 4% of a company’s annual global revenue, whichever is greater, based on the seriousness of the breach and damages incurred.

Also read: How GDPR Will Revolutionize Location Marketing

GDPR is broad and extensive. Many areas are open to legal interpretation; especially the definition of what data meets the definition of being “directly relevant to your business.” In this article, we’ll focus on the needs of the marketing operations team managing the marketing technology stack within any enterprise that collects and holds EU citizen data in its sales and marketing database, including both B2B and B2C companies.

To become GDPR compliant, here are the top ten things a marketing ops team, in collaboration with their security and privacy counterparts in IT, need to do:

Designate a Chief Data Privacy Office or equivalent
Inventory all of the systems where you may have EU citizen data
Upon request, be able to deliver all of the data you have on a specific person
Also upon request, be able to remove all of the data you have on a specific person
Sign Data Processing Agreements (DPA) with your customers, vendors, and partners with whom you share data
Be able to control the distribution of data so EU citizen data, is not transferred to any third-party who does not have the DPA in-place with your company
Install security technologies and implement privacy best practices
Have a process in place to monitor and alert impacted contacts when a breach is identified
Be able to demonstrate that you’re collecting only the personal information that is directly relevant to your business
Conduct data privacy training to personnel that will come into contact with EU data

The impact of GDPR is all-encompassing. Without the proper preparations, virtually every marketing and sales application you use and every sales and marketing service relationship you have is almost guaranteed to be a compliance risk. The one area that is the most difficult to maintain compliance is the ability to control the delivery of EU citizen data to third-party Data Processors. To illustrate how tricky this is, the following scenarios are all examples of data transfers to a third-party Data Processor:

A salesperson clicks a button inside your CRM to enrich a lead using a data enrichment service by passing name, email, address, and phone number to a 3rd party provider
A marketing analyst extracts prospect data from your marketing automation platform and emails the spreadsheet to your trusted agency partner to do some analysis
A predictive analytics vendor extracts leads from your CRM automatically to score the leads and assign attribution

Also Read: Brand Transparency for GDPR

Data delivery to a third-party Data Processor is so hard to control because data can leave your possession in a variety of means in the modern marketing technology stack, including but not limited to:

A vendor plug-in for your CRM or marketing automation platform
A native application that extracts data from your CRM and sends it to the vendor’s servers
Application-to-application integrations and connectors that synchronizes data between connected applications
A product that uses a third-party service for enrichment or validation
Embedded javascript on your forms that does dynamic look-up against a third-party database
Your custom code that calls a third-party API
A Webhook you configure that calls a third-party API
Automated scheduled delivery of reports
Manual extraction of data and sharing via email or file sharing services
A data warehouse, reporting database, customer data platform, customer engagement platform that centralizes the collection of customer data across the data sources you have

To be compliant, you need to implement process, control, and monitoring mechanisms, so you can:

Track which vendor, technology, service, and agency are GDPR compliant with DPA in place, and which are not
Base on each third-party’s GDPR compliance status, control the flow of EU data out of your sales and marketing technology stack through fine-grained data permissions and policies
Identify people data that fall under the scope of GDPR across data repositories, even if they’re missing an obvious country designation
Maintain detailed reporting on all data transfer activities to third-parties, covering both GDPR compliant and non-GDPR compliant third parties, both via manual and programmatic transfer

Also Read: Why the Tug-of-War Will Continue in 2018 Social Marketing

In closing, it is worth reemphasizing that the impact of GDPR is all encompassing. Without the proper preparations, virtually every marketing and sales application you use and every sales and marketing service relationship you have is almost guaranteed to be a compliance risk. Don’t procrastinate on taking the appropriate actions to be compliant. It can take six to twelve months of preparation to achieve compliance. If you have not already started your GDPR compliance effort, you’re already behind schedule and should start immediately.

Interview with Javier de la Torre, CEO, CARTO

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 9, 2017

0

[mnky_team name=”Javier de la Torre” position=”CEO, CARTO”][/mnky_team]

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

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Location intelligence technology needs to be more accessible and closer to the specific areas of expertise professionals understand already.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at CARTO and how you got here? What inspired you to start a location data intelligence company?
I am the Founder and CEO at CARTO. While I do a bit of everything, I particularly focus on the long term strategy for the company and staying close to our customers, ensuring we are understanding market needs that drive the future of our Location Intelligence industry.

I started my career as a scientist working on biodiversity and climate change issues. For a long time I had to work on analyzing large location datasets and effectively communicating the results for those that needed to take action in conservation or climate change preparedness. I became very frustrated with the gaps between scientists, policymakers and the general public. The average person does not understand how to interpret scientific studies and results, which led me on a mission to enable better analysis and dissemination of data for the benefit of everyone. That’s how I got into building CARTO.

MTS: How does the CARTO Engine bring together the power of multiplatform data, technology, and cartography?
The next 5 million GIS users will not know what GIS currently means to us today. The next wave of spatial professionals are going to be developers, data analysts and data scientists – not GIS experts with highly specialized training; having to attend GIS programs for two years or more just to create change. Location intelligence technology needs to be more accessible and closer to the specific areas of expertise professionals understand already. Professionals in all fields need to be able to pick up Location Intelligence in order solve the problems that matter to them. With CARTO we are looking at simplifying how people access, visualize, and analyze location data so they can quickly deploy alert systems, spatial data dashboards or custom applications.

MTS: How do you see the trends in mobile marketing and social media messaging influencing the adoption of location data platforms?
Mobile marketing has been one of the first verticals to benefit from new streams of Location Data. Leveraging real time location data streams of user locations allow for better targeting of users for advertising and geomarketing. Today, the same data, but aggregated and anonymized is what we are using for creating what we call a real time census. Instead of doing analysis based on 10 year old census data, now we can have data that is 15 minutes old, having higher precision and accuracy than ever before. This is going to change the way we solve location problems and optimize solutions dramatically. All of it started with mobile marketing and social media platforms, now we are taking it to the next level.

Also Read: CARTO Brings Geospatial Data and Analytics to Salesforce Einstein Analytics

MTS: What’s the idea behind CARTO’s Data Observatory and Basemaps?
CARTO Data Observatory is built on the idea that accessibility to data is essential for performing spatial analysis. A main step in the Location Intelligence formula is enriching your data with spatial measurements so that you can contextualize your own data and analysis with information about specific locations. For example, analyzing demographics, income, employment, and real estate data of where your customers are can help you identify similar areas with untapped client potential. Having an up-to-date index of location data enables our clients to perform not just spatial analytics, but also predictive modeling and prescriptive planning by suggesting the best way to optimize for a site. The more data we bring in the smarter it becomes.

Our Basemaps are another service that offers up to date data for contextualizing data in space. CARTO basemaps are synced with OpenStreetMap to make sure the most accurate road and building data is represented, and our styles lend themselves to a wide range of uses from creating stunning maps, to practical applications for real estate and routing.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
There is a lot of buzz going on around Machine Learning and AI. For example, the guys at DataRobot are doing some great work. In the same space, I like Dataiku and their work in enabling data scientists. In the AR space, the intersection of 3D mapping to locate objects is going to be fantastic. On a more B2B space, Celonis is having some interesting breakthroughs and I enjoy what they’re doing as well. Another interesting space is in the on-device AI. Set.gl is innovating here unlike anyone else and they’re an emerging company to watch.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Our marketing stack is designed to provide the best resources, to the right people, when they need them. We use a marketing automation system (Hubspot) for a majority of our communication, including email and social posts. Our marketing automation system transfers information to our sales CRM (Salesforce) so that our sales team can have more valuable conversations with people who reach out to us. We’ve found success in our campaigns using native platforms for digital ads.

In the future, we’ll be experimenting with implementing chat, specifically chatbots on the website and across the customer lifecycle.

MTS: Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
In July, we released “Location Intelligence for Dummies,” a 24-page e-book packed with useful frameworks, case studies, and additional resources to get started with location intelligence. The campaign was targeted at business executives and data analysts that wanted to learn how to better understand their location data and adopt best practices around collecting, visualizing, and analyzing that data.

To date, the book has been downloaded over 5,000 times through organic shares and is a great conversation starter for many of our customers and prospects.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader?
AI is tremendously expanding the possibilities of processing and modeling location data. With so many new sensors, the future of business optimization is clearly going to be assisted by AI. A big part of our strategy is ensuring we rethink how our users will be doing analytics and how our platform will assist them.

Our data science team at CARTO are always on the cutting edge of AI, and that means we get the benefit of applying it across the company. In the end, being a Data Driven company means having more possibilities to capitalize the AI revolution.

This is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Google apps, Docs, Spreadsheets, slides, etc. We would not have been able to get where we are without cloud-based/collaboration tools, spreadsheets and relational databases. Of course Slack, Gmail, and Wunderlist have been key too.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I’m not sure how smart it is, but I like to go offline and focus on emails or a specific project for two hours. Reducing the default meeting duration on my calendar to 30 minutes or less and removing the Twitter app from my phone are close seconds.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf. I find most information now in the obvious mix of blogs and podcasts. We also have a channel in slack with stuff to read that we curate as a team.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Wherever you go, there you are

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Jack Dangermond, President at ESRI.

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

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Javier” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108eb375-1e44″]

I am the founder / CEO of VigLink. We are making the web better by making every link intelligent and valuable.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About CARTO” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108eb375-1e44″]

CARTO leads the world of location intelligence, empowering any organization and individual to discover and predict key insights through location data. With CARTO’s intuitive location intelligence platform, analysts and developers build self-service location based apps that help optimize operational performance, strategic investments, and everyday decisions. CARTO’s platform makes location an accessible and active dimension of analysis, allowing anyone to effortlessly connect location data to gain insights. The unique power of CARTO is that data can now be explored with location context, empowering everyone with faster time-to-insight and accurate predictability. Founded in 2012 by a team of experts in geospatial development, big data analytics, and visualization techniques, CARTO is based in New York City and Spain, with additional locations in London, Washington DC, and Estonia. CARTO has a team of 100 employees, a portfolio of 1,200 customers including BBVA, BCG, NYC, and Twitter and more than 200,000 users over the globe. The company is backed by investors such as Accel and Salesforce Ventures.

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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.

Dreamforce TechBytes with Ashley Walsh, VP, Marketing, Formstack

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 9, 2017

1

Ashley Walsh
VP, Marketing, Formstack

Salesforce Dreamforce is one of the biggest software conferences in the world. In the run-up to this event, we unveil our special TechByte series featuring high-profile Dreamforce attendees and MarTech Champions. We spoke to Ashley Walsh, VP, Marketing, FormStack, to see what she had to say about attending Dreamforce.

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MTS: As a technology partner of Salesforce CRM, what excites you at Dreamforce?
Ashley Walsh: Dreamforce gives you access to the largest gathering of software users globally so we’re extremely excited to be a part of it. This year is especially meaningful for us since Formstack just announced the acquisition of Fast Forms—now called Formstack for Salesforce—so we’re thrilled to be at Dreamforce to introduce our new AppExchange integration to our new and existing users.

Also Read: Dreamforce Techbytes with Joe Hyland, Chief Marketing Officer, ON24

MTS: What are your expectations from the event and how do you intend to share your experiences with your colleagues and community members?
Ashley: We have 3 key goals for the event.

To meet with and show appreciation to our existing customers both at the booth and through sponsored events and parties.
To increase exposure of the Formstack brand and our newly launched Salesforce app to Salesforce users.
To further identify key relationships and partnerships that can help us improve our app and extend our reach within the Salesforce ecosystem. We’re bringing a mix of Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product, and Leadership team members and hope to come back with fresh ideas from many different growth perspectives.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Dennis Fois, President, NewVoiceMedia

MTS: How does Formstack’s integration with Salesforce CRM simplify lead generation?
Ashley: Formstack users can quickly create mobile-friendly forms with our drag-and-drop builder, either from scratch or from one of over 100 pre-made templates. Users can pass new lead information to Salesforce, auto-update existing records, attach objects to form submissions, and more, quickly and easily.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

MTS: What’s the next frontier for form conversion tools? How do you see AI/ML impacting form-building technology?
Ashley: Tools like Salesforce are alreading making form-filling faster and smarter. For instance, our new Salesforce app allows for CRM data to auto-populate fields on your form. Beyond that, AI and even text will definitely shape form-building technology. The forms of the future will be lighter, more mobile, and smarter: your forms will have a lot more information about you right off the bat than they do today, thanks to AI/ML.

MTS: What are the benefits of using Formstack in tandem with top-tier marketing automation platforms, for B2B customers?
Ashley: Most marketing automation systems offer forms, but they aren’t “smart” forms and forms often seem like an afterthought when choosing a marketing automation platform. Most marketers are evaluating that investment on what you can do with the data rather that how you get the data in. Formstack offers set of conversion tools that are not found in any other platform and focus on converting more data at the moment of truth. Everything from seeing what fields are causing friction, A/B testing fields on your forms, firing events to Google Analytics, auto-filling forms with your Facebook or Google info can be done. If you’re investing in marketing automation, smart forms are a really great complement and can help you get more leads into your system.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Matt Ostanik, CEO, FunnelWise

MTS: What buzz have you heard about GDPR and its impact on the way B2B companies manage data for CX and intelligence?
Ashley: As a company that’s centered around data collection we’ve engaged consultants to ensure our personal preparedness for GDPR. I don’t anticipate it having a huge impact on our day to day, but there’s certainly some due diligence that’s required and something we want to pay close attention to as it unfolds.

MTS: What marketing technologies are you specifically looking to explore at Dreamforce?
Ashley: From a marketing perspective, we’re highly focused on Account Based Marketing and CX platforms to support our growth strategy. We’re considering launching an online user community next year so I’m excited to dig into what technologies are available there to drive more user engagement.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Ashley.
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
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Don’t Be Late for the Party: Holiday Planning Starts Now!

Non-Traditional Celebrations

Think Inside the Box

The New Realities

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Dreamforce TechBytes with Mike Fitzmaurice, VP, Workflow Technology at Nintex

Interview with Javier de la Torre, CEO, CARTO

Dreamforce TechBytes with Ashley Walsh, VP, Marketing, Formstack

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