Simple raises more capital, appoints new local CEO
Marketing operations platform vendor, Simple, has completed a multimillion-dollar capital raising round from existing investors and confirmed a new executive leadership team locally as it looks to shore up its market presence.
The company said the latest funding, led by Perle Ventures, will be put towards product development and sales. Simple also raised $10 million in September last year. Simple’s workflow management platform is Australian grown and used by Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Xero and Swisse.
With the fresh funding comes a shake-up of executive leadership. Simple founder, James Charlesworth, will leave the business, with chief revenue officer and former local Marketo chief, Aden Forrest, stepping up to CEO. Former Google executive, Bob Mohan, was also recently appointed chief financial officer, tasked with restructuring the company’s business model to enable it to scale quickly in Australasia and help it launch into other international markets in coming months. The company is also relocating its head office from Brisbane to Sydney.
Forrest positioned Simple as disrupting the marketing resource management software industry.
“Just as Salesforce did for sales, Simple gives companies visibility into the effectiveness of their total marketing expenditure by enabling them to plan, create and optimise their marketing operations with the same excellence and efficiency they expect from other parts of their organisation,” he said in a statement.
“To date, technology has been used in a piecemeal way to fine-tune subsets of marketing, often focusing mainly on digital channels. But marketing is already the second largest expenditure item for most companies -- and growing.”
Quantcast and Quantium team up
Audience insights platform player, Quantcast, has struck a partnership with Australian data analytics firm, Quantium, aimed at bringing together online and offline data together for digital advertising.
The deal is the first for Quantcast locally, and will see the company’s artificial intelligence-powered real-time audience platform hooked up to Quantium’s QSegments transaction data offering. Quantcast directly measures more than 150 million Web destinations to glean audience insights. The combination of both will generate real-time data across 20.7 million Australian online users around purchase behaviour.
“This partnership will enable advertisers to marry powerful Quantium instore purchase data with the Quantcast real-time audience insights platform enabling brands to see the patterns in online consumer behaviour,” said Quantcast Australia and New Zealand managing director, Andrew Double.
Quantium CEO, Adam Driussi, said the agreement builds on the company’s growing list of media activation partners for programmatic advertising. “We chose to partner with Quantcast in this space because of their ability to deliver very large audiences using their real-time audience insights across the Web,” he said.
Quantcast and Quantium launched the beta tests this month and expect the country wide launch scheduled in February 2018.
Campaign Monitor aims at mid-market with latest email officer
Campaign Monitor has taken the wrappers off 1-1 Email Marketing, a new offering designed to bring enterprise-grade personalisation tools at a lower price point and with less complexity to marketers sitting in the SMB and lower mid-market.
The vendor said its latest software debut is designed to assist marketers to tap customer behaviour then leverage that data to send the right content, to the right customer, at the right time. Features include the ability to track customer behaviour across multiple brand touchpoints, advanced and dynamic customer segmentation based on engagement, trigger-based personalisation journeys aligned to customer activity online, and drag-and-drop email builder functionality.
“The B2C SMB market has been neglected - easy-to-use, yet powerful email marketing tools should be accessible to brands of any size,” said Campaign Monitor CMO, Andrea Wildt. “Our goal has always been to help growing brands solve complex problems in a simple way and this new offering will help our customers leverage consumer behaviour for truly personalised, 1-to-1 emails that drive engagement, and ultimately revenue and loyalty.”
Latest Ecommerce Suite enters Aussie market with a Flourish
Australian digital and creative agency, Flourish, has launched its own ecommerce all-in-one software solution.
The latest offering is based on the data capabilities of the agency’s US technology partner, Windsor Circle, which it has been working with for the last two years, and aimed at addressing three core online retailer issues: Cart abandonment, pre-empting purchase behaviour, and recognising more valuable customers.
On the cart abandonment front, Flourish said features include the ability to target high-value browsers who never reach the cart stage, as well as filter out users intentionally abandoning carts in an attempt to receive discounted price offers on those products.
Using Windsor Circle’s big data, the software can also establish predictive buying patterns for a site’s best customers in order to tailor email communications. The third component of the offering is Flourish’s VIP ID service, which identifies best customers and allows users to optimise loyalty marketing approaches.
The Flourish Ecommerce Suite is available as a fully account managed service to all Australian online retailers from this month.
Medallia pitches 360-degree customer view
Medallia is looking to close the loop on customer feedback with its new Medallia for Digital solution, part of its Experience Cloud offering.
Pitched as a solution for omni-channel customer engagement, the latest product is designed to capture feedback from customers on the Web and mobile devices and integrate it with data from retail stores, contact centres and other touchpoints. The software does this through AI-based text analytics. The intent is to deliver insights in order for users to make real-time interaction decisions.
“Today's integration with Medallia Experience Cloud enables companies to take advantage of Medallia's powerful reporting and text analytics to gain even deeper insights and connect the digital channel with other channels along the customer journey,” said Medallia for Digital general manager, Ori Soen.
The solution is now available in A/NZ.
LogMeIn launches fresh on-demand video platform
LogMeIn has launched into beta GoToStage, an on-demand video platform aimed at helping marketers generate awareness and new leads.
The new offering gives clients an ability to leverage recorded assets such as webinars as part of the lead qualification process, creating a customisable branded content repository. These can be uploaded onto branded and curate channel pages and are both searchable and shared. The vendor is also working on fresh reporting and analytics around viewer tracking, videos watched, attention span and lead contact information, as well as a recommendation tool to prompt end consumers with additional content.
“GoToStage gives our customers the option to promote valuable content on a platform that can reach millions of new prospects and continuously generate new leads without lifting a finger,” LogMeIn chief product officer, Chris Battles, said. “Businesses that want to capitalise on video to better connect, engage and convert customers and support the entire buyers’ journey need to harness their own video content channels without simply relying on video sharing sites.”
The Trade Desk acquires ID management player
Adtech player, The Trade Desk, says its acquisition of Adbrain, a provider of identity resolution management technology is all about providing more accurate targeting solutions to advertisers.
Adbrain’s offering has been integrated with The Trade Desk’s platform and cross-device marketplace for two years. Under the acquisition, The Trade Desk it will continue to offer device graphs in the platform, as well as support custom device graphs developed by agency and marketer clients. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Over the past year, The Trade Desk has licenced a number of deterministic cross-device data sets. Adding Adbrain to the mix is about having a proprietary deterministic graph to match a user’s identity across different devices.
The Trade Desk co-founder and CEO, Jeff Green, said the ambition is to give marketers access to an independent alternative to the walled gardens dominating the addressing advertising marketplace.
Sizmek partners to enhance video viewability and measurement
Sizmek said its new partnerships with DoubleVerify, comScore and Integral Ad Science are aimed at enhancing video viewability and verification measurement across the latest digital video content.
The buy-side advertising platform vendor said the partnerships are designed to ensure advertisers have greater workflow efficiency for HTML5 video measurement, the latest framework for digital video. Through its Verification API framework, Sizmek claims to provide a unified way of trafficking, as opposed to manually wrapping and sending tags back and forth between technology providers, adding latency and the risk of human error.
HTML5 is supported by Sizmek’s In-Stream HTML5-based VPAID and In-Stream Enhanced Video formats.
“Our customers demand greater control and transparency in an increasingly complex ecosystem,” said Sizmek chief growth officer, Mike Caprio. “These partnerships are critical to supporting our clients to the fullest and showcases our commitment to helping customers realise the benefits of an unified platform that sits across the entirety of the media plan.”
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