CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 20 August 2020

Oracle reportedly looking to buy TikTok

Oracle is reportedly in talks to buy the US operations of TikTok, after US president, Donald Trump, signed an executive order forcing its Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the platform within 90 days.

Oracle joins Microsoft, and reportedly Twitter, in considering buying the short-form video platform. 

Adobe releases new data governance capabilities 

Adobe has released new data governance capabilities for its real-time customer data platform (CDP), a first-of-its-kind framework that has been developed to empower brands to manage their customer experience data across the enterprise, from the point that it has been collected to when it is being syndicated to use cases outside of the platform. 

The key features of the new data governance capabilities include labels to stay compliant with data usage policies, data usage restrictions by defining marketing use cases to ensure profiles or segments are compliant with your data usage policies, managed data usage policies to control types of marketing actions, and enforced data usage compliance.

Validity launches email platform Everest

Validity has launched Everest, an all-new platform for email optimisation, analytics and delivery.

The new platform takes advantage of the capabilities of 250ok, Return Path and BriteVerify, which Validity acquired in the past two years.

Everest is powered by Validity’s data feeds and widespread integration and support within the email ecosystem. With configurable dashboards, an intuitive user interface, and seamless integration with many of the leading email service providers, Everest is pitched at making it fast and easy to optimise campaigns. It also features a set of reports to track overall performance, with customisable alerts to proactively warn when action is needed.

UJET and Kustomer extend partnership

Cloud contact centre, UJET, has announced a partnership with Kustomer to offer businesses UJET’s multimodal, omnichannel contact centre solution alongside Kustomer’s SaaS CRM platform.

The partnership brings both UJET and Kustomer’s human-centric and innovative solutions together for a more innovative CCaaS and CRM integration and customer journey unification.

UJET’s Agent Adapter eliminates multiple tools and simplifies the agent interface so all visual and contextual information is presented in a single view. UJET evaluates customer data, endpoints, and contextual metadata to route customers to the appropriate agent and passes data to the Kustomer CRM at the beginning, during and end of the session in an automated manner, significantly reducing post-session work.

Revcontent launches browser targeting

Content discovery platform, Revcontent, has launched browser targeting, a new advertiser targeting option.

Revcontent advertisers are able to drive highly engaged audiences from premium publishers into all stages of the marketing funnel, with browser targeting increasing advertisers’ ability to customise spend and scale. Granular targeting and robust reporting offer real-time ROAS to allow advertisers to make intelligent buying decisions to drive app downloads, lead generation, ecommerce, brand awareness search or editorial campaigns.

Intercom releases new features for conversational support

Conversational support platform, Intercom, has launched new features to bring enterprise-grade efficiency and scale to conversational support.

The new features allow support teams to manage more complex customer queries and deliver shorter reply times to even the most complex or VIP customer questions, help teams automate manual tasks and processes to scale support to more customers, and leverage insights from rich reporting features to optimise their conversational support.

The key features include bots which can collect the exact information support agents need to route and prioritise an issue in minutes, allowing them to identify, triage and reply to customers quicker than via email ticketing; Messenger updates give support teams the flexibility to respond to customer inquiries when the time is best for them - whether that’s real time or later; new reporting insights to see which customer issues are taking up the most time, monitor workload and optimise day-to-day support efficiency.

Integral Ad Science and Channel Factory launch Channel Science

Integral Ad Science (IAS) has announced the launch of ‘Channel Science’, an industry-leading partnership between Channel Factory and IAS.

The single product aims to ensure YouTube campaigns are brand-safe, brand-suitable and performance optimised.

IAS’s channel and video level protection combined with Channel Factory’s expert curation of YouTube content and performance-led approach provides marketers with a single solution for YouTube advertising. IAS is certified in both brand suitability and contextual targeting and brand safety reporting, and both IAS and Channel Factory are joint YouTube Measurement Partners (YTMP). 

Longtail UX secures $2.25 million

Longtail UX, an Australian-founded tech outfit which specialises in real-time website analytics and customer acquisition functionality, has raised an additional $2.25 million in funding.

Woolworths Group’s venture capital arm, W23 and Steven Lew owned group, Global Retail Brands (GRB), led the latest funding round. The investment builds on the $3 million funding round, led by Investec in March.

The investment will support Longtail UX’s international expansion and delivery of its full self-service platform, as well as enhancing the launch of Longtail UX’s new product - LUX Shopping which is designed to increase the ROI of ecommerce advertising by improving the shopper journey on clients’ websites.

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