All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Acquia, Confirmit, Xandr, Drift, Freshworks, HubSpot, Aprimo, Blis, AgilOne and Big IDea.
Blis and Location Sciences announce alliance
Blis, a real-world intelligence provider, announced it is the first global location intelligence company to embrace independent verification of data quality from independent location data verification and analytics company, Location Sciences.
Blis and Location Sciences are coming together as two independent companies with a common goal for more transparency and data integrity in the advertising industry.
Greg Isbister, CEO of Blis, commented: “Being independently recognised by Location Sciences both for location data and signal quality accuracy, adds a valuable layer of impartial authentication for our customers.”
Blis' proprietary technology, Smart Pin, filters out over 80 per cent of the data received because it doesn’t meet quality and accuracy standards.
Acquia acquires Cohesion
Digital experience company, Acquia, has acquired the UK-based Cohesion, creator of DX8, an enterprise-grade, low-code Drupal website builder.
With this acquisition, content marketers and site builders with minimal coding skills can create Drupal websites up to four times faster, according to user testing.
With Cohesion DX8, Acquia continues to invest in technology for creating on-brand Drupal websites. Cohesion DX8 offers the in-browser creation of themes, layouts, and pages to empower designers and marketers to quickly build beautiful new sites.
Cohesion DX8 can also help large multi-brand organisations with dozens or hundreds of Drupal websites, providing brand consistency across all websites while empowering regional creativity.
Latest release of Confirmit Horizons
Highly visual, rapid field research analysis, enriched call handling management and immediate rewards for survey respondents are among the new enhancements Confirmit is providing market research organisations with the latest release of its comprehensive software platform, Confirmit Horizons.
A new introduction to Confirmit Horizons 2019 is free “Fieldwork Reporting”, a highly visual, out-of-the box reporting capability. Free to use and available in one click from Confirmit’s Survey Designer module, the report automates processes for simple and quick review and analysis of survey results.
Further enhancements delivered by Confirmit Horizons include a range of CATI improvements designed to make call handling and management easier.
Xandr Monetize launched
Xandr, AT&T’s advertising and analytics company, has debuted Xandr Monetize, a reimagined strategic selling platform built on the foundation of AppNexus technology.
The company said Xandr Monetize aims to enable media companies to unlock the full value of their premium content and improve the advertising experience for consumers. To do this, Xandr Monetize gives publishers and media owners full control to navigate the consumer journey and client relationships. The platform offers content owners improved monetisation, through better inventory management capabilities, data-driven yield optimisation, and differentiated buyer demand.
Xandr Monetize encompasses all the features of the former AppNexus seller products, including an ad server, supply-side platform (SSP), and yield analytics, and now lays the infrastructure for TV capabilities. The platform unifies and simplifies operations across all inventory and transaction types, as well as demand channels.
Drift announces acquisition of Giant Otter
Drift, a conversational marketing platform, has acquired Giant Otter and launched Drift Automation.
The acquisition of Giant Otter has allowed the group to form the Drift AI Lab. Drift founders, David Cancel and Elias Torres, unveiled the first product built out of the AI Lab: Drift Automation.
Drift Automation understands the specific context of what someone is asking and can engage in conversations that go in a variety of directions. This puts the customer is in control of the conversation -- not the chatbot, the company claimed. Key features include an AI engine custom built for the client's business; direct access to conversation designers; and access to a conversation analysis tool so customers can search and monitor conversations.
Giant Otter marks the third acquisition for Drift. Financial terms have not been disclosed. The company also recently purchased Siftrock, a Seattle-based company that focuses on email reply management, which helped build Email Bot. And earlier this year, Drift acquired HYFY to power Drift Video, the company’s video platform built to start conversations and make B2B buying easy.
Freshworks announces Freshsuccess
Freshworks, a customer engagement software company, has released its new Freshsuccess customer success management software, delivering an integrated customer view for marketing, sales, support and success professionals.
Now, go-to-market teams can leverage unified, holistic data of both accounts and contacts yielding the most up-to-date account activity and health information to identify accounts that are either at risk or ready to buy more goods and services.
With Freshworks’ Freshsuccess, users get detailed analysis of past behaviour to create and configure customer health scores, allowing companies to grow an established customer base, identify any red flags and increase customer retention rates. In addition, Freshsuccess helps teams operationalise customer success in other important ways.
Freshsuccess will be generally available in January 2020.
HubSpot launches redesigned App Marketplace
HubSpot has launched a new app marketplace that features hundreds of third-party tools that HubSpot users can integrate with their accounts.
According to the vendor, businesses can discover new integrations and connect their tools, teams, processes, and data with a single, connected system. Key features of the redesign include: More informed integration decisions, easier discovery of relevant apps for HubSpot users, and decreased friction and improved discoverability for app developers.
The new self-service app listing experience gives app creators a simple, streamlined way to create and manage their marketplace listings.
Other HubSpot tools announced this week include a new duplicate management tool, now available to all Professional and Enterprise customers across all three hubs. HubSpot has also tapped into customer feedback to improve the editor experience for email and knowledge base, adding dozens of drag-and-drop templates to both. With improved formatting and enhanced ease-of-use, both features are now optimised for quick editing. The knowledge base editor is now live for all Service Hub professional and enterprise customers; the email editor is now available across Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, and Enterprise.
The company also has a number of new conversations features now available in beta, including a free Facebook Messenger integration that enables customers to create a Messenger experience on their Facebook Business page and manage those interactions from their conversations inbox.
Aprimo unveils Aprimo AI
Aprimo has a new Aprimo AI framework and made artificial intelligence enhancements to its Aprimo Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Productivity Management (intelligent workflow reviews and approval) solutions.
Aprimo AI’s capabilities aims to address the complexity of delivering content for a personalised and differentiated customer experience at scale, from ideation to creation of content to management and enrichment of content, by leveraging base artificial intelligence services and Aprimo’s own machine learning solutions.
Aprimo AI is focused on delivering solutions within the content life cycle in three distinct ways: Responsive resource optimisation, enriched content to maximise ROI of existing content, and unlock content value.
In addition, new enhancements allow Aprimo AI to learn about a business over time, specifically in the following ways: Aprimo learned AI image tagging, and Aprimo learned AI custom image cropping.
Blis and Location Sciences announce alliance
Blis, a real-world intelligence provider, has become the first global location intelligence company to embrace independent verification of data quality from independent location data verification and analytics company, Location Sciences.
Blis and Location Sciences are coming together as two independent companies with a common goal for more transparency and data integrity in the advertising industry.
Greg Isbister, CEO of Blis, commented: “Being independently recognised by Location Sciences both for location data and signal quality accuracy, adds a valuable layer of impartial authentication for our customers.”
Blis' proprietary technology, Smart Pin, filters out over 80 per cent of the data received because it doesn’t meet quality and accuracy standards.
The Big IDea raises $US50 million
The Big Idea has announced two milestones: A US$50 million Series C round of funding and the debut of its data intelligence platform, BigID Enterprise
This round of funding round brings total funding to US$96 million over the last 18 months, and positions BigID to serve customers better by bringing to market new products for data privacy, security and data governance. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors, including SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and ClearSky, as well as new investor, Salesforce Ventures.
BigID Enterprise includes deeper data insights, data source coverage, support for data pipelines, first-of-its-kind scale and management, and a new app store for privacy, security, and data governance capabilities. The new platform’s data intelligence gives context and insight to important privacy, security and governance questions related to consent, access, purpose, and destination.
BigID’s enterprise data discovery and intelligence platform empowers companies to comply with new global regulations like GDPR and CCPA – and helps them meet data privacy, security, and governance needs by cataloguing, classifying, clustering, and correlating sensitive and personal data that companies collect.
AgilOne launches Cohort Analysis
AgilOne, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) for enterprise brands, has taken the wrappers off AgilOne Cohort Analysis.
Built for marketers, the analytical solution aims to empower marketers to gain critical business insights derived from the AgilOne CDP to drive marketing strategy, all through a self-service interface. By offering Cohort Analysis as an application on top of cleansed, de-duped, enriched, and unified CDP data, AgilOne hopes to give marketers the most accurate and complete way to understand customers, campaigns, and KPIs.
Analytical teams can utilise Cohort Analysis in AgilOne’s reporting application, AgilOne Metrics, and in AgilOne Interactive Queries.
Cohort Analysis lets marketing and analytics teams do the following: Gain ad-hoc, self-service insights about audiences by slicing and dicing cohorts within AgilOne Metrics, freeze cohorts and analyse periodic snapshots to identify changes, trends, and opportunities within your customer base over time, and understand the business impact of marketing campaigns.
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