CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 16 March 2017

Marketo teams up with Infor

Marketo has struck a global partnership agreement with business applications vendor, Infor, to bring their respective platforms together in order to deliver more customer experience-led solutions.

Under the agreement, Marketo’s Engagement Platform architecture will be integrated with Infor’s Customer Experience Suite, providing what the pair claim is a more complete view of the customer to marketers. The deal will also broaden the reach both organisations have globally.

“Marketers are looking for solutions that enable a seamless and meaningful experience across devices and channels. Our partnership with Infor, a global leader in customer experience, provides market-leading engagement technologies that enable brands to create personalized and authentic experiences at scale for their customers,” said Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas. “The partnership also broadens distribution of engagement technologies to meet the increasing global market need.”

Infor CEO, Charles Phillips, added the Infor + Marketo solution aligns with the vendor’s overall digital transformation strategy.

“We’re providing customers speed to transform while adding value to relationships at the right time, through the right channels – better than anything else available.”

Outfit raises $1m for homegrown brand automation platform

Australian martech company, Outfit, has secured $1 million in investment to fuel local and international customer take-up of its brand management software. The platform is designed to digitise brand guidelines and help marketers automate and scale the production of marketing collateral. The fresh cash injection from Microequities Venture Capital Fund will be used to create 10 new jobs, expand the customer base in Australia, and support efforts to break into the US market by the end of 2017.

Outfit was founded in 2014 and was originally a custom solution developed to deal with the brand design needs of open source vendor, Red Hat. It was built by Brisbane-based NetEngine, which also now works with several universities and franchise groups. The company now claims it’s near closing $1 million in annual revenues off the platform.

Under the arrangement, MVCF member and co-founder of Equity Venture Partners, Howard Leibman, joins the Outfit board.

“Brand automation represents a significant global market opportunity and Outfit is at the forefront of innovation in the area,” Leibman said. “Outfit provides a best-in-class platform and solves a very real problem – how to efficiently manage multi-location, multi-channel marketing collateral at scale.

Outfit founder, Bruce Stronge, said the investment was a validation from one of Australia’s leading venture capital firms.

“More than an investment, this is a strategic partnership to build on our vision for Outfit and take it to global markets,” he said. “Howard and his team have backed some of Australia’s most successful SaaS companies, including Siteminder and Deputy. Their experience helping technology companies to scale, along with their networks within the US investment community will be of immense benefit.”

Campaign Monitor acquires Tagga

Campaign Monitor’s CMO says the vendor’s acquisition of customer data platform (CDP) startup, Tagga, is about filling the gap B2C marketers have in managing, operationalising and personalising marketing activities based on customer behaviour.

The Australian-founded vendor announced its acquisition of Tagga on 16 March. Under the deal, the latter’s CDP offering will be integrated with Campaign Monitor’s email marketing automation platform, with a beta due out later this year. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

Tagga is based in Vancouver and has less than 50 staff, most of which are expected to stay on once the deal closes, including all digital and data experts.

Campaign Monitor CMO, Andrea Wildt, said the acquisition was another step forward in the company’s quest to deliver a next-generation CRM for the B2C market and “democratise behavioural customer data”.

“What we have been seeing across marketing in general is a trend towards personalisation, because it drives higher engagement and revenue,” she told CMO. “Last year, we responded to this by launching a visual journey designer, which we had a great response to.

“But what we’ve also found a lack of access to data to drive personalisation, particularly when it comes to behavioural data. That’s what we’re trying to solve with the acquisition of Tagga.”

Read our full report on the acquisition here.

Quantcast and SpotX join forces

Ad tech player, Quantcast, has teamed up with inventory management platform, SpotX, to combine its advanced data modelling and targeting capabilities with the latter’s premium video supply offering.

The global deal gives Quantcast the ability to access SpotX’s premium publisher network in 29 markets including Australia and New Zealand. Quantcast’s flagship Measure product collects and aggregates data from more than 100 million Web destinations, which is then analysed and used for targeting purposes via the vendor’s digital advertising product.

“This partnership affords us access to premium video inventory while overlaying the smarts of our sophisticated data and decisioning,” said Quantcast A/NZ managing director, Andrew Double. “This increased scale will put us in a strong position to meet the market demand for programmatic video.”

SpotX provides programmatic enablement and ad serving technology for video publishers. A/NZ country manager, Christopher Blok, added Quantcast enables it to add even more data to the programmatic video advertising landscape.

Clicktale debuts its own experience cloud

Clicktale has taken the wrappers off the Clicktale Experience Cloud, an analytics-based platform aimed at helping users better manipulate customer data sets.

The new platform unites online behavioural data, machine learning, data science, cognitive computing and psychological research in order to help marketers better understand customer experiences online and respond to them. The foundational Experience Centre capability captures behavioural data including in-page interactions across Web, mobile and apps, then visualises these in order to provide real-time view of customer interactions. These can be benchmarked against KPIs as well as rated based on visitor segments.

Clicktale has also debuted the Clicktale Psychological Analytics application, which uses proprietary behavioural and psychological models and advanced data science methods to try and understand a customer’s motivations and intent.

The vendor’s customer base includes Microsoft, Adobe, The Royal bank of Scotland, Adidas and Avis.

“Regardless of a visitor’s previous buying patterns, it is possible to sense whether he or she is goal-oriented, browsing, disoriented, or exhibiting a different mindset, or even if a particular page on your site changes the visitor’s cognitive orientation negatively or positively,” Clicktale CEO, Tuval Chomut, said. “This is just one way the Clicktale Experience Cloud is using cognitive computing to come up with actionable insights for our customers.”

The solution will be generally available in April 2017.

Pitney Bowes and Yellowfin partners up on visualisation

Yellowfin says it will build a business intelligence and visual insights tool for Pitney Bowes customers under a new agreement announced this week.

The proposed Spectrum Visual Insights tool will help gather insights on customer data and is being pitched at helping with fraud, marketing, customer support and compliance management. It will be offered under the Pitney Bowes customer Information Management platform.

In other Pitney news, the vendor has announced a new data practice aimed at helping clients better use data and analytics and improve their utilisation of location-based data. The new practice will see customised industry data sets to clients planning digital transformation initiatives, Pitney Bowes VP of data product management, Dan Adams, said. It’s based around capabilities acquired through Maponics last July, which Adams previously led.

“Our objective is to support our client’s desire to increase the value of location-based data and deliver competitive differentiation,” he said.

Sprinklr launches social display offering

Social media management platform, Sprinklr, has launched a new digital visualisation offering to showcase social channel data via digital displays in retail, command centres, events and outdoor advertising environments.

The vendor said the Sprinklr Display solution automatically transforms 24 social channels into a unified platform and visualisation for digital displays. Features include a hub to manage real-time social media data for intelligence, along with customisable templates, storyboarding and reporting.

“Display is the only solution helping brands power consumer-facing experiences for retail and events, as well as command centers that provide insight to cross functional marketing and care teams,” said Sprinklr’s AVP of display, Justin Garrity. “With Display on Sprinklr’s integrate-able platform, brands can easily transform their data into insight and deliver engaging experiences in any location.”

Ugam comes to Australia

Managed analytics company, Ugam, has opened its first Australian office in Melbourne.

The vendor focuses on the retail and manufacturing space and provides a managed services offering aimed at harnessing big data to inform business strategy. The US-based business has been around for 17 years and also has offices in New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Mumbai and Bangalore.

The company said it has already been working with several local retailers on pricing, product and marketing decisions over the past year. The decision to launch in Australia comes at a key time when the local retail sector is facing significant pressure from international players.

“The Australian retail market is demonstrating tremendous change and dynamism. It is evident in changing shopper behaviour, and the recent and likely entry of competitors like Alibaba and Amazon,” Ugam CEO, Sunil Mirani, said. “In this challenging environment, it will be pertinent for retailers and manufacturers to operationalise analytics-driven decisions to remain competitive and more effectively meet the needs of shoppers.”

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