All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Adobe, IBM, Apple, Daisee, Suzy, 6Sense and more.
Adobe debuts Experience Profile, customisable AI, Ad Cloud enhancements
Creating a common data language to build a single customer experience record, customisable AI modelling and integration between creative assets and media targeting, are among the major product enhancements announced by Adobe at this year’s digital marketing summit.
The vendor has launched a new Experience Profile across Adobe Cloud, the underlying platform that supports its offerings such as Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud. This ‘experience record’ is being supported by several new data services that the vendor said will allow users to create a unified profile of their customers in real time, in order to target them more effectively.
Adobe is striving to do this by standardising all customer data, across Adobe clouds as well as third-party systems, through a common data language to make it centrally accessible.
In addition, vendor has unveiled several data development-based capabilities. The most notable is Data Science Workspace, which allows data scientists to build and train custom models in the Adobe cloud platform. The service gives developers access to pre-built Adobe Sensei machine learning algorithms, via API, in order to develop new functionality. The first custom AI service is focused on algorithms that increase speed of content delivery and asset provision and personalisation, such as image tagging and cropping.
Enhancements to the Adobe Advertising Cloud were also on the list this week. The most notable is Adobe Advertising Cloud Creative, a self-service platform aimed at helping users break down the walls between creative and media assets. The offering is the result of fresh integration between Ad Cloud, Creative Cloud and Analytics Cloud, and functionality that makes available creative assets, along with first-party data, through the Ad Cloud platform.
Check out our full report on the Adobe product announcements here.
Daisee raises $8.8 million in Series A funding round
Daisee, an Australian artificial intelligence company, has raised $8.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Alium Capital, with Thorney Opportunities and other investors to help realise the opportunities for AI in companies around the country.
Daisee leverages AI research from leading universities, including Deakin University and University of NSW, to create software applications for companies across a variety of industries.
The Series A funding will fuel Daisee’s growth and allow the group to hire more software engineers and data scientists. Since inception in August 2017, Daisee has grown to 22 employees, with offices in Sydney and Melbourne.
IBM and Apple announce AI partnership
Apple and IBM have teamed up to allow AI augmentation on iOS apps. IBM Watson and Apple are being combined to offer two new products: IBM Watson Services for Core ML, and the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple.
The iOS-Watson product is for image recognition, where developers could use the product to build apps that can recognise visual content and analyse images for scenes, objects, etc. The image recognition process takes place on the devices with Core ML.
Core ML is an Apple framework that can be used to integrate machine learning into apps. Watson Services trains, tests and deploys updated models to Core ML, providing for continuous learning over time for iPhone and iPad apps.
Meanwhile, IBM also unveiled a new blockchain product this week that lets startups and developers build their own distributed ledger projects.
Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a growing record of transactions or other data. IBM's new technology will be permission-based, and only give access to a finite number of approved parties. The new product is currently in beta testing.
Thin Film integrates platform with Adobe Analytics Cloud
Thin Film Electronics announced it is integrating its CNECT Platform with Adobe Analytics Cloud to assist brand marketers in NFC mobile marketing.
Adobe Analytics Cloud’s integration with Thinfilm’s CNECT platform will allow marketers to gain access to real-time consumer ‘tapping’ activity on physical products and break down the data silos for digital and offline customer interactions.
“Blending real-time physical interaction data with other customer data can help marketers make sense of consumer behaviour at salient points of product engagement where the physical and digital worlds converge,” said Cody Crnkovich, head of platform partners and strategy at Adobe. “We look forward to working closely with Thinfilm to provide marketers with data on additional offline customer touchpoints.”
Suzy launched
Suzy, a technology platform that harnesses collective insights from consumers worldwide to deliver real-time intelligence, has been launched.
Suzy claims to be the voice of consumers, helping companies validate critical assumptions so they can focus on creating compelling new products, developing the most effective marketing strategies, and validating direct offers that increase conversion, improve path-to-purchase, and drive growth.
Suzy’s clients include Netflix, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Citibank, Verizon, Nintendo and Nestle, among others. The company has also secured funding from Foundry Group and Tribeca Venture Partners, and recently closed a strategic partnership with iHeartMedia as part of a larger consumer marketing push which will kick off later this year in efforts to expand its user base.
“Listening to consumers is not just important for brands today, it’s mission critical,” said Suzy CEO, Matt Britton. “The collective voice of consumers has spawned unicorns and crippled industries, rewarding companies who put customers first and destroying those who don’t. With time, we envision Suzy becoming an open and on-demand exchange of human intelligence. We see the platform acting like a ‘Waze for business’ – unlocking the power of human intelligence and providing simple solutions for everyday business decisions.”
Amplero announces AIM
Amplero has improved capabilities around automatically discovering hidden, actionable signals from customers.
Amplero AIM provides a transparent, unified, longitudinal view of each customer and discovers dynamic audience clusters based on existing behavioural and profile data, audience segments, and existing machine learning models from enterprise marketing cloud data ecosystems, including Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle. This capability allows brands to understand their customer and deliver relevant, individualised interactions across every medium.
“Today's consumers demand meaningful, individualised interactions across every channel—or they'll take their business elsewhere," said Amplero founder and chief scientist, Olly Downs. "Integrating with our customers' existing marketing cloud investments, Amplero gives marketers the ability to continuously optimise every interaction against the key business metrics that underlie long-term customer relationships."
6sense launches Demand Platform
6sense has taken the wrappers off the 6sense Demand Platform for account-based marketers.
The 6sense Demand Platform aims to uncover account-based demand by monitoring intent on first and third-party data sources, and connects anonymous and known data to provide comprehensive account engagement and account interest insights. The platform can also be used to create segments for campaign execution, activate account segments via account-based digital advertising, account-based lead generation, or account-based email nurture triggers, enables sales with account and competitive intelligence and workflows, and scores accounts and leads for prioritisation.
"This evolution of 6sense to an ABM platform in partnership with our customers is a clear indication that machine learning and AI have an important role to play in ABM, not just in analysing data and predicting outcomes, but in actioning data insights in a timely manner to drive business results,” said 6sense CEO, Jason Zintak.
Springbot launches Exchange
US-based marketing automation vendor, Springbot, has launched a data cooperative for e-commerce players called Exchange.
The platform offers email, social media and other marketing tools to retailers that use BigCommerce, Shopify, or Magento e-commerce environments. Using Exchange, a retailer can upload an anonymised list of customers and Exchange will lookalike-match the attributes against the attributes of other customers in the co-op.
The platform aims to allow businesses to gain crowd intelligence from CrowdTap’s group of users.
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