All the latest martech and adtech news from Metigy, Freshworks, Zen Global, mParticle, monday.com, Storyblok, Fyllo and Contentgine
Australian martech goes into voluntary administration
Administrator for Australian martech business, Metigy, is investigating a sale of its IP and assets after the business went into voluntary administration last week.
Cathro & Partners was appointed the administrator of Metigy effective 2 August 2022 after the after the organisation went into voluntary administration, leaving 75 employees out of work. In a statement, the firm said it’s now working with creditors and investigators to assess the business commercials and explore the possibility of a sale and is expecting to have a report out in the next week.
Metigy offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered marketing solution for small businesses to help with social and digital marketing performance. It was founded in 2015 by We Are Social’s David Fairfull and Johnson Lin.
In November 2020, the company raised $20 million in a funding round, led by Cygnet Capital, its fourth raise, bringing total capital to that point to $27.1m. At the time, the company also claimed to be chalking up triple-digit revenue growth and boasted of a customer base of more than 26,000 clients globally. The oversubscribed funding round was earmarked to accelerate Metigy’s international expansion in the US and Southeast Asia, grow the company’s product and engineering teams in Australia and establish US and Singapore offices.
In a statement, Cathro & Partners principals, Simon Cathro and Andrew Blundell, said now is the time for interested parties to approach and indicate interest as they look to find a quick solution for Metigy’s future.
“We are exploring the urgent sale of Metigy’s assets and intellectual property as part of the voluntary administration process and consider a sale could be an outcome in this process,” the pair said.
Metigy former employee and brand and communication functional leader, Clare Riley, posted on LinkedIn that she and 75 of her colleagues are now out of work.
“We're pretty shell-shocked. It's not because we didn't care enough or because we did a bad job or the market conditions weren't in our favour - and that will always be the toughest thing to deal with when you work as hard as we did,” Riley stated in her LinkedIn post on 2 August.
Freshworks extends chat, integrates with Google Business Messages
Freshworks has debuted its Summer ‘22 product launch, offering new features such as Freshchat conversational messaging to support agents, marketers and sales teams engage customers across multiple messaging channels in one platform.
The latest release includes Freshchat artificial intelligence (AI) bot-assisted conversational messaging, which sits alongside Freshmarketer and Freshsales on the Freshworks’ unified customer record architecture. This collection improves customer engagement by unifying messaging channels on a single platform. Freshdesk announced the functionality initially as an ecommerce solution for Shopify merchants. It also offers pre-built Freshchat playbooks to help agents get chatbots up and running faster on their messaging channels including Instagram, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and SMS.
Also included in the latest product release is Freshmarketer for Shopify, which packages marketing automation, multichannel campaigns and conversational marketing. These come with Shopify-specific playbooks to help users build out segmentation, targeting, marketing campaigns and reporting for all stages in the customer journey.
Freshdesk Omnichannel integrations also sees extended customer support to telephony providers helps companies streamline conversations from voice to messaging. In addition, new workforce management capabilities have been introduced via an integration with Injixo to forecast workload across channels, assist with staffing and scheduling decisions, and automate workforce planning.
Also now on offer are new messaging integrations for Instagram DMs and Twilio SMS through the Freshworks Neo Platform, and no-code custom objects to allow businesses to bring their own business data to Freshdesk. For service staff, there are enhanced on-call management capabilities in Freshservice as well as improved alert management.
Freshworks has also expanded its conversational messaging capabilities to include Google’s Business Messages. The integration with Google’s Business Messages for Freshchat, Freshdesk Omnichannel and Freshsales Suite aims to enable clients to support their customers directly on Google Maps and Google Search mobile apps. Freshworks and Google’s Business Messages integration is built on the Freshworks Neo platform and is now publicly available for all accounts.
Liquor Marketing Group acquires loyalty company
Independent membership owned liquor retail group, Liquor Marketing Group (LMG), has acquired 100 per cent of issued capital in Zen Global (Zen).
Zen is an Adelaide-based company specialising in providing data connectivity, loyalty, digital marketing, gift card solutions and in-store digital advertising to retail liquor and hospitality industries. The acquisition follows extensive engagement between LMG and Zen on the opportunity of incorporating Zen’s loyalty and digital marketing platforms to complement LMG’s existing digital marketing reach.
Financial terms have not been disclosed. The Zen management team have all agreed to remain with the company. Zen will remain a separate enterprise with its own dedicated management and operational team. LMG said it will initiate implementation of Zen Global platform modules in H2,2022 with wider application in 2023.
LMG CEO, Gavin Saunders, said Zen provided LMG and members a great platform to further enhance our digital marketing and data connectivity.
“Many LMG members are current customers of Zen; however, this transaction allows LMG to provide solutions which apply across the entire network and enhance our brands and our customer offers,” he said. “There are immediate benefits to LMG members, including real-time stock on hand and order processing for LMG’s eCommerce platform, along with medium and long-term benefits like integrated gift card solutions and banner loyalty offers.”
MParticle acquires AI personalisation platform
Our second acquisition this week is by martech vendor, mParticle, which picked up Vidora, an AI personalisation platform for customer data, for an undisclosed sum.
The purchase is set to help mParticle provide new capability for teams to easily create AI models and deploy insights to any of mParticle’s 300 integrated tools without data science expertise. In advance of the acquisition news, mParticle and Vidora teams had already worked together on a new release of mParticle Intelligent Attributes, powered by its Cortex AI, now available to customers.
Intelligent Attributes are AI-generated predictive models of user behaviour. This is distinct from mParticle’s Calculated Attributes, which are computed from historical data. Use cases for Intelligent Attributes include predicting likelihood of conversion or churn, predictive customer lifetime value scoring and use classification. MParticle said Intelligent Attributes can then be forwarded as custom user attributes to other tools for personalisation.
“Our vision is to help companies accelerate time to data value. Over the past eight years, we’ve been helping brands solve foundational customer data challenges centred around data quality, governance, and connectivity,” said VP of product marketing, James Fang, in a blog post. “But in order to deliver market-leading customer experiences, brands need to be able to get more out of their data.”
Fung said Intelligent Attributes is the first of many use cases available with Cortex’s predictive modelling and decisioning capabilities.
As well as integrating Vidora’s proprietary technology, mParticle said it’s adding Vidora’s team, led by Vidora CEO, Alex Holub, to its employee ranks. It’s mParticle’s second acquisition in the last seven months and follows the purchase of customer journey analytics player, Indicative, in January.
Storyblok launches new CMS experience
Austria-based content management system (CMS) vendor, Storyblok, has taken the wrappers off its all-new offering.
Storyblok V2 includes a fresh user interface and new design experience, collaboration tools and an enhanced digital asset manager designed to improve content workflows. The approach is based on headless CMS architecture to allow developers to build and publish everywhere as well as integrate with any tech stack.
Tools include a visual editing experience, Google Docs-style collaboration suite, composable components, presets and powerful publishing workflows. V2 also introduces support for a US data centre, providing Storyblok users with additional hosting options across the US and Europe.
Locally, Storyblok customers include Pizza Hut Australia, Liberty Finance Australia, Vicinity Centres, and Octopus.
“We built V2 because companies need flexibility and smarter workflows to adapt and scale to support the ever-increasing complexity of omnichannel digital experiences,” Storyblok co-founder and CTO, Alexander Feiglstorfer, said. “After testing it in beta with our 82k+ users over the past year and listening to their feedback, we’re finally ready to show even more companies what content management should be like in the 21st century.”
Fyllo expands presence in APAC
Data-driven marketing and regulatory solutions platform provider, Fyllo, has appointed an APAC chief as it looks to build out its presence in-region.
Fyllo has appointed Robert Woolfrey as managing director, APAC to open and lead the company’s business in the region. He reports to Fyllo chief commercial officer, Jeff Ragovin. Woolfrey will be responsible for growing Fyllo’s marketing and regulatory solutions across Australia and Asia with a focus on cryptocurrencies and high-growth industries like gaming and fintech. Fyllo first entered the APAC market with the recent acquisition of Semasio, a pioneer in unified contextual targeting for digital marketing.
Woolfrey has nearly 20 years of experience growing and directing business operations across the region. He was formerly senior vice-president, Asia for advertising and martech platform, Amobee, where he was responsible for integrating two global acquisitions. Woolfrey’s resume also includes stints with Turn and Videology, spearheading the latter agency’s expansion across Asia.
“Fyllo was set up to tackle the hardest problems in marketing and advertising – helping dynamic and highly-regulated industries go to market and achieve their full growth potential,” Woolfrey stated. “Many of the brightest – and progressive – minds are moving into crypto in Asia. This represents an immediate opportunity for Fyllo, where we can demonstrate our combined marketing and regulatory expertise.”
Contentgine debuts new AI, ML capabilities
Gleaning insights from content meanwhile, is the focus for Contentgine, which launched new AI and machine learning capabilities across its Content Indication Platform (CIP) this week.
The SaaS vendor said the latest enhancements are aimed at helping B2B marketers uncover greater content consumption insights more readily. It does this by surfacing first-party content consumption metrics to prioritise and expand target account lists and make more meaningful connections with sales prospects.
Contentgine customers can now view a new signal location map to geographically pinpoint where a specific account’s content engagement activity is most prominent, no matter where users are located. In addition, a new user interface helps filter account and content insights to provide additional views of data sets organised by industry, company size, revenue, HQ location and intent score. Marketers can then view the smarter data and/or plug it into their marketing automation or account-based marketing (ABM) platform to direct the strongest sales efforts.
The platform also can now extract meaningful words and phrases across Contentree, the world’s largest B2B library, then aggregate the results by frequency and engagement. This includes pain points and buying considerations for in-market accounts that can be used to personalise outreach and tailor messaging to the specific needs of an account. It also provides insight into common messaging from high-performance assets within a category.
To do this, CIP uses AI and machine learning to analyse 100 million quarterly engagements and consumption patterns with Contentree’s more than 500,000 case studies, whitepapers and ebooks.
Monday.com launches sales CRM
Work management solutions vendor, monday.com, has launched a new CRM platform as the first of five new product solutions designed to support teams working in sales, marketing, software development, project management and line-of-business.
The new sales CRM is based on the vendor’s low code, no-code platform approach and designed to be flexible, customisable and scalable. The key ambition is to unify customer processes under one platform and assist companies to manage all aspects of their sales cycle and customer data in one centralised place.
Monday sales CRM integrates with hundreds of apps and services including Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Aircall, Mailchimp, PandaDoc and Docusign. Other key features include task automation, email sync with Gmail and Outlook, email tracking, team goals management, post-sales management and sales operation operational tools.
“We’re building a CRM that is fast, flexible and breaks down departmental silos to connect teams across entire organisations, which increases efficiency and results,” said monday.com sales CRM product lead, Ron Kimhi. “Our new approach to CRM that is unified but also very easy to use, ensuring a seamless journey from prospect to customer and beyond, optimising daily teamwork, team satisfaction, and success.”
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