CMO's top 10 martech stories for this week - 24 March

Adobe unveils next generation Marketing Cloud

Marketing technology giant, Adobe, has rolled out a range of new enhancements across its Marketing Cloud aimed at driving better use of data and analytics in marketing.

Top of the list is a series of machine learning and data science and analytics capabilities. One of these is Smart Tag in Adobe Experience Manager, which automatically creates predictive tags for pictures and suggest similar images based on those tags. A new feature in Adobe Analytics, meanwhile, is Segment IQ, which automates discovery of overlaps and differences between audience segments, comparing and identifying behavioural differences as well as insights to address them.

Also coming later this year in Adobe Analytics is Virtual Analyst, a machine learning capability that uses inputs from a marketer and other users as well as changes in the data to suggest relevant insights for better decision making..

Within Adobe Target, the vendor has introduced a new ‘lifetime value decision’ feature aimed at helping marketers predict a path of purchases leading to the highest profit from a customer over time.

Alongside data science improvements, the vendor also announced plans for the Adobe Marketing Cloud Co-op, aimed at helping marketers move away from marketing to devices and instead, market to people. The cross-device matching initiative will see Adobe stitch together data on different devices used by an individual that interacts with brands participating in the Co-op.

You can read our full report on Adobe’s marketing technology enhancements here.

Marketing technology landscape 2016 released

Noted marketing technology commentator, Scott Brinker, has released the 2016 edition of his well-known marketing technology supergraphic, featuring a whopping 3874 technology solutions.

The list of vendors is nearly double that reported by Brinker in 2015, and shows the top five categories as being sales automation, enablement and intelligence; social media marketing and monitoring; display and programmatic advertising; marketing automation and campaign/lead management; and content marketing.

In his commentary on the new supergraphic, Brinker noted that he’d revised the layout to reflect the fact that many marketing departments have multiple platforms in their marketing technology stacks. This has been made possible because vendors are increasingly investing in making it easier for users to integrate different technologies together, as well as the rise of integration platforms-as-a-service.

You can find the supergraphic and information here.

Hootsuite and ZeroFox join forces on social media security

Hootsuite has partnered with social media security company, ZeroFox, to bring the latter’s capabilities into its social media management platform.

The technology will allow Hootsuite customers to identify, manage and tackle social media threats and fraudulent activities within the Hootsuite dashboard. ZeroFox has become part of Hootsuite’s open ecosystem platform, which supports 200 business applications and integrations.

“Businesses can face real risks on social media, and they need solutions to help detect, respond and resolve threats quickly and effectively,” said Kevin Zellmer, vice president of business development at Hootsuite. “Today, we’re teaming up with ZeroFOX to give our customers seamless access to a best-in-breed social media security solution and help them proactively address threats.”

Domo raises US$100m, announces Business Cloud

Business intelligence vendor, Domo, has chalked up another US$131 million in its latest investment funding round, retaining its $2 billion valuation and bringing its total funding to more than $590m.

The funds were announced as the vendor took the wrappers off its Business Cloud offering during its Domopalooza proprietary event in Utah. The platform of business management capabilities is aimed at bringing together the data, people and insights business users need to make faster, better-informed decisions to improve corporate performance.

Domo said the Business Cloud leverages thousands of data sources and sophisticated technology developed to bring that data seamlessly together. It then layers on a consumerised user experience through apps, social and mobile capabilities.

Core to this offering is the new Domo Appstore, a marketplace of pre-packaged business management apps built by a developer ecosystem. This week, Domo confirmed 1000 new apps had been added to the ecosystem.

Domo also unveiled several complementary product offerings at its proprietary event. These include Domo Mobile, which brings Business Cloud to mobile users in app or mobile Web varieties, and provides capabilities to personalise how apps and metrics are viewed. It also allows live data exploration and includes business workflow features.

In addition, Domo launched Buzz, a social collaboration platform for its Business Cloud and an upgrade to its existing collaboration feature. Key features include user and team administration and unlimited search history and template dashboards around social metrics performance.

Domo also announced it had reached a milestone of $100m in billings.

Lotame aims for audience optimisation

Data management platform provider, Lotame, has released Audience Optimizer, a new solution powered by machine learning algorithms to help drive campaign optimisation and engagement.

The new functionality was built in-house and is an extension of the vendor’s Lotame Insights analytics solution, Audience Optimizer aims to improve digital ad campaigns' performance and efficiency, as well as transparency, by identifying consumers who have the highest likelihood of engaging with an ad or purchasing a product, service or solution. It does this by analysing behavioural attributes to determine which are most likely to predict a consumer's actions.

“With Audience Optimizer, our brand and agency clients will further benefit from predictive modelling, evolving the perfect audience into perfect audiences for the most successful campaigns,” said general manager of Audience Optimizer at Lotame, Ray Duong.

The new solution is integrated with a range of demand-side platforms (DSPs) including Google's DoubleClick Bid Manager and AppNexus.

YesPath debuts B2B marketing platform

US-based YesPath has launched its first product for account-based marketing (ABM) in the B2B space.

According to YesPath, its offering, which has been in private beta testing, will allow any marketer to run an ABM program that scales. It does this by tapping into artificial intelligence and algorithms to select the right person at the right time, and automate cross-channel campaign coordination aimed at specific accounts.

The SaaS platform monitors a sales team’s list of target accounts then turns this data into account profiles. Based on these profiles, an engagement engine matches the right content to each account, and each persona. It can then trigger an email to share content about that use case, or queue up a special offer for when that account visits the website. The platform can also alert sales teams to perform specific actions.

The vendor said another core component is YesPath’s Intent Network, which analyses signals of interest across the broader Web and is fuelled by B2B publisher data provided by the vendor’s partner, Bombora. This intent data is combined with marketers’ existing data to power real-time content recommendations.

YesPath was cofounded a year ago by two former Salesforce executives: CEO, Jason Garoutte, and CTO, Brian Zotter. Its early customers include Blue Jeans Network and MongoDB.

Lookerbot lets you bring data into a Slack conversation

In much of the enterprise software world today, data is data and chat is chat, and rarely the twain shall meet. Looker aims to change all that.

The data platform provider has launched Lookerbot, a new tool for Slack's popular messaging software that lets users bring their data directly into the conversation. Looker's data platform aims to create a single source of truth so that every business team can easily ask and answer their own questions; current users include Yahoo, Warby Parker and Sony.

"Data has been something people do out-of-cycle," said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker. "Data needs to be part of the conversation, no matter where it’s happening."

A single command is all that's required to find data from within Slack; when users type it, Lookerbot returns the answer directly into the Slack conversation. The data is displayed in Slack as it appears in Looker, with visualisation choices including charts, maps and tables as well as custom options.

Moat raises US$50m to tackle ad metrics

New York based marketing analytics vendor, Moat, has raised US$50 million in funding to support its quest of delivering new standardised advertising metrics to the market.

The company is best known for its ad viewability tracking technology and is used by the likes of Nestle, AOL, Kellogg’s and Twitter. The company now hopes to create a standard metric that will serve as a currency for selling and buying digital advertising across advertisers and publishers.

According to a report in MarTech Advisor, the primary goal of Moat’s new metric is to give advertisers negotiation power over ad deals instead of relying on the old practice of basing sales on the number of ads delivered through ‘ad serving’ software to a Web page.

Mobify and Astound Commerce partner up

Mobile commerce vendor, Mobify, and ecommerce vendor, Astoung Commerce, have struck a partnership aimed at helping retailers and brands leverage mobile for customer engagement.

The deal sees Astound providing strategy, technologies and interactive marketing services around the Mobify Customer Engagement Platform. The platform combines mobile Web and native applications with push messaging and location-based marketing.

“Nearly every enterprise from the world's premier brands and retailers to ebusinesses of all sizes is looking for the best way to support mobile customer experiences and keep pace with a mobile technology landscape that is changing at lightning speed," said Igor Gorin, CEO of Astound Commerce.

Astound Commerce also has expertise in Demandware, Magento and IBM WebSphere, and works with the likes of Adidas, Bally, Belstaff, Jimmy Choo, L'Oreal and Under Armour.

Acquia offers $500,000 to community for Drupal 8

Digital experience platform provider, Acquia, is offering up $500,000 to fund community development on Drupal 8. The vendor has established the Drupal 8 Module Acceleration Program, aimed at speeding up delivery of key Drupal 8 modules to help drive improvements to its digital experience offering.

Acquia said Drupal 8’s adoption since its launch in November is twice that of Drupal 7, and a sign of Drupal's increasing popularity, especially in the enterprise space. Among the highlights of Drupal 8 does are improved content modelling and built-in REST APIs.

“Community-contributed modules fuel innovation in digital experience delivery. We’re working with customers to identify priority modules for acceleration, and we’re coordinating the efforts of many community contributors around the world,” said Acquia chief products officer, Chris Stone. “The modules being funded have an immediate impact on current Drupal 8 projects at global organisations.”

More than 30 modules have been completed to date with support of the Module Acceleration Program, with another 20 modules targeted for development in the next 60 days.

• With additional reporting by Katherine Noyes

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