CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 10 June 2021

Salesforce aims for integration with latest 360 enhancements

Salesforce has taken the wrappers off the latest version of its Digital 360 platform with enhancements aimed at better integrating marketing, commerce, sales and service.

Latest improvements for the Marketing Cloud include connectors between Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Interaction Studio, Einstein and Loyalty Management tools to link up audience segmentation and activation across channels and parts of the customer funnel.

Within Advertising Studio, Salesforce is now offering Snapchat audience match, so users can bring first-party data to creating and targeting personalised advertising offerings through the social platform. This includes building look-a-like audience profiles through matching characteristics or by including customers from former marketing campaigns. WhatsApp is also being better supported through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud WhatsApp Business Solution.

Also on the enhancements list are Datorama reports for Marketing Cloud including new email and journey analytics, accessible directly in the Marketing Cloud interface.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud updates, meanwhile, now includes connectors with Salesforce CDP to ensure customers get a view of first-party data across all touchpoints. There’s also a new B2B2C Commerce app, which can be used to launch new connected, direct-to-consumer ecommerce storefronts with clicks rather than code.

Salesforce Order Management has been updated with Distributed Order Management, Omnichannel Inventory and Order Management for B2B customers. And in line with growing maturity of headless commerce, there’s the new Progressive Web Application (PWA) Kit and Managed Runtime, designed to help developer teams quickly and cost-efficiently decouple front-end and back-end technologies to create highly customised consumer-facing experiences.

Cognigy secures US$44 million

Customer and employee service automation player, Cognigy, has raised US$44 million in Series B funding to drive development and uptake of its conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Cognigy.AI.

The latest funding round was lead by venture capital and private equity player, Insight Partners, and supported by existing investors including DN Capital, Global brain, Nordic Makers, Digital Innovation and Growth and Inventures.

Cognigy was founded in Germany five years ago and counts global brands such as Lufthansa, Bosch and Daimler as customers. The company plans to use the latest investment injection to accelerate customer growth, create new partnerships and keep improving platform capabilities in the name of speeding up enterprise AI adoption.

Stackla gets acquired

Visual content marketing player, Stackla, has been acquired by Nosto for an undisclosed sum.

US-based Nosto has an AI-powered commerce experience platform. The vendor said the acquisition will allow its retail customers to deliver more personalised user-generated content (UGC) experiences to online shoppers through more sophisticated management and delivery tools. It’s the first acquisition completed by Nosto.

Specifically, Nosto said Stackla’s platform will help brand to automate the discovery, curation, management and publishing of UGC, centralised digital assets, leverage content curation and recommendations and build creator communities. The acquisition will also give Nosto the opportunity to extend into hospitality and travel categories currently served by Stackla.

“Brands are struggling to create enough engaging and diverse content to deliver the types of authentic, personalised experiences consumers expect,” commented Nosto CEO, Jim Lofgen. “By pairing Stackla’s unrivalled UGC platform with Nosto’s leading commerce experience platform, we can solve this problem for brands, giving them the ability to create more meaningful shopping experiences that drive results.”  

Smartsheet Advances dynamic work approach

Enterprise workflow management vendor, Smartsheet, has debuted its new Smartsheet Advance offering, promising more capabilities to help manage workflow at scale.

Smartsheet said the new improvements are the direct result of customer feedback and meeting the need for speed, flexibility and protection. Key features include a centralised control centre for process management, ability to plug Smartsheets into systems of record such as Jira and Salesforce, tools to create more intelligence workflows that automate business processes, multi-level security incorporating monitoring and data encryption, and secure request management through Dynamic View. In addition, the vendor has added more powerful governance and admin capabilities through its Admin Centre.

Another Smartsheet Advance Solution, called Smartsheet for Marketing, has also been unveiled, which the company said extends the power of its offering for those requiring more custom tools for specific use cases around marketing. These include resource and digital asset management for marketing teams, as well as a centralised launchpad for campaigns allowing marketing teams to conduct personalised activity.  

The company said there are now three tiers of Smartsheet Advance available to customers – Silver, Gold and Platinum – to allow clients to start then scale capabilities as required.

Lotame ID solution gains more supporters

Lotame has confirmed PubMatic and MediaMath have come on-board to support its Panorama ID solution, a people-based identity solution pitched as a key alternative to cookie-based advertising.

Under the new partnerships, sell-side platform, PubMatic, said it will make it “effortless” for publishers to leverage the Lotame Panorama ID as an official ID provider in the PubMatic Identity Hub. It’ll also be a scaled data provider for the Audience Encore product.  

To further extent premium audience reach, Lotame has joined the MediaMath identity marketplace, allowing advertisers to leverage the Lotame Panorama ID to target first-, second-, and third-party data audiences in all browser environments. MediaMath has its own identity infrastructure via Source that Lotame is now working alongside.  

Lotame Panorama ID is a people-based identity solution for the open Web and promises privacy-compliant, rich, pseudonymised data. The company claims the average Panorama ID carries more than 200 behavioural attributes.

The offering comes as the whole industry looks to build solutions to cope with the demise of the third-party cookie.

Amobee partnership aims to open up audience insights  

Adtech player, Amobee, has teamed up with the HYP platform for complex decisioning. The aim is to give marketers and agencies access to one of Australia’s largest audience databases for targeting and analytics across digital screens from connected TV to out-of-home.  

HYP’s 1500 audience segments are now available for activation on the Amobee platform as a cookie-free and privacy compliant data source. Coupling data points derived from mobile intelligence including location, behaviour, age, gender, income, retail expenditure and household type with advanced machine learning, the companies said they hope to give marketers deeper insights into consumer journeys, audience profiles, visitation and incrementality. In coming weeks, HYP will also be exclusively launching a data partnership with Amobee, which will be ID free.

“With the imminent demise of third-party cookies, it is important for us to integrate with data providers that are future-proofed,” Amobee A/NZ VP of sales, Andrew Dixon, said. “HYP’s priorities are aligned with ours at Amobee and we are extremely excited to make their data available to our partners and clients.” 

SurveyMonkey rebrands to Momentive

In a move aimed at reflecting its growing portfolio of experience management capabilities, SurveyMonkey has rebranded to Momentive.

The survey provider announced the news this week, noting the new brand identity was developed using its own portfolio of customer feedback solutions to gauge the opinion of 22,000 respondents across even countries. As part of the change, parent company, SVMK, begins operating under Momentive Global and the new ticker, MNTV this month, while wholly owned subsidiary, SurveyMonkey, flicks over to Momentive on 1 July 2021. The company also owns the GetFeedback solution. The company has more than 20 million active users and provides software to 345,000 organisations globally including IBM, LG Electronics, Nasdaq and KLM.

“We changed the game 20 years ago by creating the survey software category, and we’re proud of how we’ve scaled our offerings, our customer base, and our ambitions,” said CEO, Zander Lurie.

Read more: CMO Profile: Balancing science and art for the perfect customer experience at SurveyMonkey

Toluna launches subscription-based enterprise insights  

Toluna is claiming a first with its new Enterprise Insights Subscription developed in response to client feedback and market demand.  

Toluna is a 20-year old business that focuses on delivering real-time consumer insights for market research purposes. Its grands include Harris Interactive Europe and KuRunData.

The subscription-based offering gives customers unlimited access to Toluna’s Start platform, research experts and consumer insights powered by its global panel community. It’s claiming the ability to access such services via subscription is a first for the research business.  

Toluna founder and CEO, Frédéric-Charles Petit, described insights as the “new currency” in today’s market.  “The future of research must evolve to meet new market demands and enable insights anytime, anywhere. We are thrilled to deliver this first-of-its-kind solution that will help our clients solve contemporary challenges, define their investment strategy, and drive brands into their next stage of evolution,” he said.   

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