All the latest martech, adtech and customer technology news from Unity Software, Neustar, Northbeam, Gorgias, Contxtful, Pattern, Current, Klaviyo and MailChimp.
Unity Software board rejects AppLovin bid
The board of Unity Software has rejected a US$20 billion unsolicited bid by AppLovin to merge and is sticking with its proposed acquisition of ironSource.
As reported by CMO, AppLovin submitted a compelling non-binding proposal last week to combine its mobile marketing and monetisation offering with Unity Software’s platform for creating and operating 3D content. The deal valued Unity Software at about US$20 billion. However, the deal was contingent on Unity abandoning its proposed acquisition of ironSource for US$4.4bn.
In a statement dated 15 August, Unity Software’s board said it completed evaluation of the unsolicited proposal from AppLovin with outside financial and legal advisors and unanimously determined against it, deeming it an inferior proposal to Unity’s agreement with ironSource.
“The Unity Board reaffirms its recommendation to Unity’s shareholders to vote in favour of the previously announced ironSource transaction and recommends against the unsolicited AppLovin proposal,” the statement read.
Together, Unity and ironSource expect to generate a run rate of US$1 billion in adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2024 and $300m in annual EBITDA synergies in three years.
“The board continues to believe the ironSource transaction is compelling and will deliver an opportunity to generate long-term value through the creation of a unique end-to-end platform that allows creators to develop, publish, run, monetise and grow live games and real-time 3D content seamlessly,” Unity president and CEO, John Riccitiello, said. “We remain committed to and enthusiastic about Unity’s agreement with ironSource and the substantial benefits it will create for our shareholders and Unity creators.”
Northbeam raises US$15 million for its marketing intelligence platform
Northbeam has raised US$15 million in Series A funding to build out its machine learning-powered platform for marketing intelligence.
The US-based vendor’s machine learning tools aim to help marketers get a clearer picture of the ROI of their marketing spend as well as provide intelligence insights for optimising performance across channels. These include customers’ buying behaviour across all channels, including influencers, owned media, TV, podcasts, press and direct mail.
The latest funding round was led by Silversmith Capital Partners. Northbeam, which was founded in 2019, will use the funds for further product development, including expanding its machine learning capabilities. The investment also comes after Northbeam reported 37x year-over-year revenue growth between July 2021 and July 2022, and struck commercial partnerships with brands such as PetMeds, The Ridge, Jones Road Beauty, TRUFF, Vessi and Hexclad.
“The Northbeam team brings together the relevant experience in marketing and AI required to help marketers make sense of ever-expanding amounts and sources of data,” added Silvermith general partner, Sri Rao. “Customers we spoke with are consistently enthusiastic about their partnerships with Northbeam and we are excited to support the company as partners in this next phase of growth.”
Gorgias scores US$30m in investment
Another player with its sights on the ecommerce space is Gorgias. The company joins this week’s martech roundup for securing US$30 million in Series C funding to support its ambitions to improve customer experience, retention and conversion rates.
The latest round was led by Alex Bangash from Transpose Platform and Bram Sugarman from Shopify, with participation from insider Jason Lemkin from SaaStr and Rajeev Dham from Sapphire Ventures, CRV and Alven. Gorgias raised US$25m in its Series B round in December 2020. The latest brings its valuation up to $710m.
Gorgias said the new funding will drive its goals of helping merchants improve conversion and retention rates. It highlighted three main priorities: Improving the merchants’ customer experience to drive retention and repeat purchases among their existing customers; automating repetitive customer interactions to leave more time for important conversations; and identifying high-value and high-intent potential customers to generate more revenue from customer conversations.
Specifically on the product front, the company is working to improve statistics and reporting features to make them more robust and easier to use, taking steps to make the platform faster, and building further integrations on top of the 85 channels and apps it already supports. Gorgias has 10,000 merchant clients serving more than 200 million customers.
“From the start of Gorgias, our mission has been to empower all merchants to deliver an exceptional customer experience [CX]. While this mission has always driven revenue for our merchants, we’re excited to focus further on the vast potential of CX-driven revenue with this round,” Gorgias CEO, Romain Lapeyre, said.
Contxtful raises CAD$3m for attention metric tools
Also raising money this week is Canadian-based startup, Contxtful. The company has secured CAD$3 million (AUD$1.45m) to build the breadth and scale of its Receptivity attention measurement solution.
The Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) included investment from Canadian and American angel investors with deep roots in the advertising industry, Silicon Valley’s NJP Ventures, and original investors. The funds will be used to keep improving Receptivity’s AI model, ramp up hiring in all departments and launch a concerted commercialisation push in the US and Europe.
Receptivity is a metric measuring users’ attention right before they are exposed to ads. This is achieved without third-party cookies, in real-time, using non-private sensor data from the user’s mobile device, such as the gyroscope and accelerometer.
“We're here to disrupt an industry and change how people think about adtech. The human context is something we can finally measure in real-time and leverage all while remaining ethical, and YES, cookieless.” said Contxtful CRO, Éléonore Piché. “How? We're speaking with innovative SSPs and DSPs to make Receptivity available at scale to advertisers and agencies who actually want results. Let's take the next year to turn the industry around for good without waiting on Google to finally decide to drop cookies and unethical practices to lead our industry.”
Pattern acquires influencer marketing player, Current
Ecommerce acceleration vendor, Pattern, has acquired Current, a leading influencer marketing platform.
Current’s influencer marketing technology will be folded into Pattern’s ecommerce acceleration platform, bolstering the technology to help brands drive traffic and conversion for product listings on D2C websites, global marketplaces and other digital channels. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Current’s platform aims to help brands connect to millions of creators to produce authentic content at scale, measure influencer-driven sales and return on spend, and manage creator payouts. It’s used by global brands such as Spotify, Oura Ring and Olive and June. Pattern, meanwhile, has been around since 2013 and helped a number of brands with D2C website and marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart.com and eBay.
“Conversion is still the biggest commercial opportunity for brands in the digital landscape, and authentic influencer programs drive the kind of high-quality traffic that leads to category leading conversion,” said Pattern Co-Founder and CEO, David Wright. “Current’s technology gives brands the ability to quickly scale up, manage, and optimize their influencer campaigns to keep pace with a rapidly evolving digital and cultural landscape. With Current’s capabilities folded into our ecommerce acceleration platform, it’s a winning combination for brands that want to drive unprecedented traffic and conversion for their product catalogues.”
Neustar and Snowflake partner up
Neustar, a TransUnion company, has taken the wrappers off its Neustar Unified Identity built natively on Snowflake Marketplace.
The aim is to offer customers the ability to execute advanced identity resolution across the Snowflake Media Data Cloud without data leaving the platform. Neustar developed the solution using the Snowflake Native Application Framework, currently in private preview, with the goal of providing joint customers with privacy-enhanced data hygiene, enrichment and data collaboration capabilities.
The native Unified Identity application gives clients direct access to Neustar’s data, identity graph and machine learning capabilities in a data clean room to power use cases across their first-party customer and second-party partner data. These could include working with other brands and media partners across the marketing landscape. The two companies said the solution will also help organisations maintain accurate and enriched information about consumers with continuous, real-time data updates.
“Neustar Unified Identity will allow our joint customers to accelerate and secure their data collaboration initiatives by leveraging the speed, scale, and performance of Snowflake’s platform,” said Snowflake global head of media, entertainment and advertising vertical, Bill Stratton. “We believe this new application will empower customers to more quickly and seamlessly unlock data for business value.”
Klaviyo suffers security breach
Klaviyo has become the latest customer technology vendor to suffer a security breach after being the victim of a phishing attack.
In a blogpost on 8 August 2022, the company confirmed suspicious activity coming from the Klaviyo account of an employee identified their login had been compromised as a result of a phishing attack on 3 August. The telltale sign was suspicious activity from internal logging and a user report, which a threat actor used to gain access to the employee’s Klaviyo account and some internal support tools.
The company has commenced an investigation alongside a leading cybersecurity firm and notified law enforcement. At the time of the blogpost, Klaviyo said it knew the hackers had targeted primarily crypto related accounts and viewed list and segment information for 44 Klaviyo accounts, downloading list or segment information for 38 of them. This information contained names, email addresses, phone numbers and some account specific custom profile properties. All accounts have been notified with details of which profiles and profile fields were accessed or downloaded.
The threat actor also viewed and downloaded two of Klaviyo’s internal lists used for product and marketing updates. These exports included information such as name, address, email address and phone number. The download did not include any passwords, password hashes, credit card numbers or account data and all impacted individuals have also been notified.
“We are concerned about potential phishing or smishing efforts by the threat actor and want our customers, contacts, and employees to be skeptical of any password reset requests, requests for payment info, or emails from unusual domains,” Klaviyo stated. “We have also seen new websites copying the Klaviyo layout trying to obtain Klaviyo logins. There may be a spike in phishing campaigns and look alike websites in the coming weeks.”
Klaviyo warned customers to be wary of password resets, text message or SMS messaging asking for login details, or any requests from so-called ‘employees’ asking for passwords. It also recommended companies enable multi-factor authentication. On its end, the company is further limiting access to internal tools to its private network (VPN) and Klaviyo issued devices and has restricted account data downloading.
“We are updating our internal algorithms for detecting suspicious user behaviour based on data from this attack,” the company stated. “We are also taking additional steps to enhance our security and to prevent a similar attack from occurring in the future and remain committed to improving our security through regular assessments.
“At this time, we have confidence that we have removed the attacker from our systems. Our internal security team and external forensic experts are nonetheless still completing the investigation.”
Mailchimp suffers second security breach
Mailchimp also hit the headlines this week after suffering its second security breach in four months.
In a statement dated 12 August, the digital marketing vendor confirmed it had suffered a phishing and social engineering attack earlier in the month, targeting cryptocurrency and blockchains using its email marketing platform. In response, the company said it’s taken proactive measures to temporarily suspend account access for accounts where it detected suspicious activity while it investigates the incident further.
“We took this action to protect our users’ data, and then acted quickly to notify all primary contacts of impacted accounts and implement an additional set of enhanced security measures,” the brief statement read. “We did not suspend accounts based on their industry, and we are committed to continuing to serve crypto companies. We are reviewing our Standard Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy in light of our commitment to bringing innovative crypto solutions to our customers.
“We realise this may have caused uncertainty for our crypto-related users and their customers and apologise for the disruption. We are continuing our investigation and proactively providing impacted users with timely and accurate information throughout the process.”
According to a TechCrunch report, 214 MailChimp accounts were affected, just months after hackers compromised an internal tool to access information on 300 accounts.
As a result, one of MailChimp’s customers, DigitalOcean, cut ties with the vendor after discovering its account had been compromised on 8 August. From this, it had ascertained some customer email addresses may have been exposed. It also noted a small group of customers experienced attempts at compromising accounts through password resets. The company confirmed the attacks had now stopped.
“While the security incident and investigation proceeded, the broader email outage incident management team decided to immediately migrate critical services away from Mailchimp to another email service provider,” DigitalOcean stated.
Off the back of this, the company also said it’s working to improve threat models and security visibility in its third-party SaaS and PaaS environments, is overhauling business continuity plans to better account for downtime from third parties and recommending two-factor authentication to customers.
Nominations for the CMO50 2022 list of Australia's most innovative and effective marketing leaders are closing on 26 August 2022! Don't miss this opportunity to be recognised among the best marketers this country has to offer as well as celebrate your team's achievements get your questionnaire completed now: https://www.cmo.com.au/cmo50/
You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page
In the third and final episode of our 3-part CMO50 video series exploring modern marketing and why it’s become a matter of trust, we’re delighted to be joined by Telstra’s former CMO and now digital services and sales executive, Jeremy Nicholas, and Adobe VP Marketing Asia-Pacific and Japan, Duncan Egan.
Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.
Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?
As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.
