CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 25 August 2022

All the latest martech, adtech and customer technology news from VidMob, Ortto, RevSure.ai, Amperity, MediaMath, VWO, Medallia and Proofpoint.

VidMob raises US$110 million

Creation management platform, VidMob, has secured US$110 million in Series D investment this week to bolster both its platform development and global sales and marketing efforts.

The latest investment round was led by Shamrock Capital with strong participation from new and existing investors including ID Fund, Drive by DraftKings, eGateway and Proof. Other existing investors include Adobe, Shutterstock and BuildGroup.

VidMob’s creative platform is designed as an end-to-end solution that helps brands optimise the performance of creative advertising assets by unifying data and analytics with creative production. The company claims its revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 110 per cent and to have experienced accelerated growth every year for the past four years.

VidMob will use the Series D funding to further invest in sales and marketing, accelerate platform development and expand its global footprint.

“We see the immediate and long-term value of the VidMob platform to improve creative performance with data and insights,” said Shamrock Capital partner, Laura Held. “The team has a clear vision and an impressive list of clients, including global brands that are making creative a key driver of business performance.”

Ortto debuts free AI tool to predict email open rates

Homegrown marketing automation vendor, Ortto (formerly Autopilot) has taken the wrappers off a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool it claims can predict email open rates before a marketer clicks send.

The company has achieved this by training a neural network on billions of email subject lines and the corresponding open rates for emails sent by Ortto’s customers since 2015. Ortto CTO and co-founder, Chris Sharkey, was surprised by how accurate the AI was when predicting open rates.

“We tested the AI predictions against thousands of email marketing campaigns that were sent, and to our surprise the AI was incredibly accurate, often only 2-3 basis points off the actual result,” he said.

Ortto CEO and co-founder, Michael Sharkey, predicted this kind of AI utilisation will kill A/B testing for marketers long term. “After using AI to predict an open rate of a subject line I’ve never even sent, it was clear to me this is the beginning of the end of A/B testing. The technology is game changing, it will ensure marketers never send a poorly performing email marketing campaign again,” he commented.

The tool is available now for free through Ortto’s AI labs.

RevSure.AI secures US$3.5m in seed funding

Also securing the cash this week is RevSure.AI, which announced US$3.5 million in seed funding led by Innovation Endeavors as it made its official market launch.

RevSure has a sales pipeline readiness solution aimed at connecting marketing and sales funnels to help B2B SaaS companies better improve their pipeline track record. It does this by providing visibility into the leads pipeline from end-to-end, as well as predictive insights on open leads most likely to convert to opportunities and those more likely to close. There are also tools for automated reporting.

This is the second AI startup for RevSure CEO and founder, Deepinder Singh Dhingra. His first was Samya.ai, which was acquired by AI analytics unicorn, Fractal Analytics. Alongside Innovation Endeavors, angel investors in RevSure.ai include Katrin Ribant, Rick Scanlon and Sharath Keshava Narayana. RevSure’s solution is set for release in September 2022.

“While there are revenue intelligence tools for pipeline conversion and sales forecasting, intelligence for pipeline generation has been an afterthought,” claimed Singh Dhingra. “An unpredictable pipeline leads to unpredictable revenue generation. We want to address this gap that urgently requires a solution - especially in a slowing market. Sales pipeline readiness is the missing link in driving predictable and profitable revenue growth.”

MediaMath gets behind Unified ID 2.0

MediaMath has thrown its weight behind the Unified ID 2.0 open source framework for cookie-less media pioneered by its competitor, The Trade Desk.

Unified ID 2.0 is designed as a collaborative and open-source framework to drive an industry-wide approach to Internet identity post-cookies. MediaMath said its open approach to identity and support of the framework allows advertisers using its platform to choose the identity solution that works best for their business, region and audience.

In addition to Unified ID 2.0, MediaMath has enabled the ability to transact on identity solutions from other providers, including ID5, LiveIntent, LiveRamp, Lotame and Parrable.

“As the industry continues to innovate and work towards an alternative to the deprecation of third-party cookies, we believe it is vital we partner with our peers and clients to enable their choice of scalable, privacy-conscious identity solutions,” said MediaMath chief partnerships officer and head of data and analytics, Sylvain Le Borgne.

In comments made to AdExchanger, Le Borgne said MediaMath is planning to use the UID 2.0 API so its clients can upload lists of hashed emails from their CRM systems, which MediaMath will be able to match with and make available for targeting in its own platform. The integration with UID2 also allows MediaMath to execute bid requests containing UID2 IDs and later, connect the dots back to onboarded UID2 identifiers. Advertisers will then be able to target first-party audiences based on UID2 IDs, she said.

Amperity opens Australian office

Customer data platform (CDP) company, Amperity, has opened an Australian office and brought on a new area VP to scale business across the Asia-Pacific region.

Amperity has appointed Billy Loizou, former VP and go-to-market leader for Cheetah Digital, as its new area vice-president to lead sales and marketing efforts and build a team of dedicated experts to help brands in the APAC market make better use of owned customer data.

The new Australian office will offer local engagement to the growing number of clients, a list that already includes Endeavour Group and Servco Pacific, Toyota’s largest dealer group locally. The five-year-old company’s international expansion also includes a new office in the UK and a data centre in the Netherlands to complement its current presence in Eastern Europe.

“By establishing a larger footprint in Australia and across Asia, Amperity will be able to service brands anywhere they are located or doing business,” said Amperity CEO, Barry Padgett. “Amperity has seen a huge amount of growth in the region over the past few years as brands grapple with how to put their customer data to better use and leverage it for growth. Our customers and prospects in this region will be able to draw from the expertise of Billy and his team from day one, so they can put the power of customer data to work immediately.”

VWO adds personalisation and CDP functionality

While we are on the subject of CDPs, experimentation software vendor, VWO, has added a CDP as well as personalisation functionality to its offering this week.

VWO Personalize visualises visitor data to help create personalised experiences for a brand’s online visitors. It enables users to target different visitor groups for different variations of content and deliver experiences optimised and personalised based on customer data such as purchase history, interests and shopping preferences.

VWO Data360 then helps users collect and centralise customer data including demographics, product affinities and buying behaviour. For example, VWO Data360 users can target their experimentation campaign to a set of people who have completed a certain set of actions in the past or re-target users who add items to the cart and abandon it.

“We have purpose-built VWO Personalize and VWO Data360 for our users to deliver hyper-personalised experiences and gain deeper insights into their customer journey. This will help them make informed decisions and simplify their experimentation journey significantly,” said VWO senior VP of engineering, Ankit Jain.

Medallia gets Mindful with latest acquisition

Customer management vendor, Medallia, has closed its acquisition of Mindful, the company behind a cloud-based contact centre callback technology.

Mindful (formerly VHT) automates intelligent callbacks in the contact centre, with use cases such as shifting call volumes to the most efficient times, routing calls to the most effective queues, and making connections more seamlessly. The company claims it eliminates over 4 billion minutes of hold time for customers globally each year.

Medallia’s said the combination of its journey orchestration capabilities with Mindful will enable organisations to automatically identify and transfer the highest-value customers to the contact centre. For example, clients can automatically place high-value customers in the contact centre callback queue for a supervisor based on experience signals captured through speech analytics, or detect a customer late in their buying journey but struggling with a website and take action by offering to schedule a callback to complete the transaction over the phone.

The acquisition came more than a year after Medallia and Mindful began working closely together across shared customers. Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

“With Mindful, Medallia can give brands the ability to create more seamless and personalised experiences across every channel. We can increase the quality and volume of customer interactions,” said Medallia CEO, Leslie Stretch. “Most importantly, we can help enterprises focus on the right way to talk to the right customers at the right time.”

Proofpoint puts the emphasis on intelligence compliance

Cybersecurity and compliance management vendor, Proofpoint, has launched its new Intelligent Compliance Platform, offering enterprises regulatory compliance safeguards while simplifying corporate legal protection practices.

The platform uses Proofpoint’s proprietary machine learning engine to provide AI-powered collection, classification, detection, prevention, search, e-discovery, supervision and next-generation predictive analytics on data while meeting complex compliance and information governance obligations. These are designed to help classify and predict risks across a wide array of digital communications channels, files, email and endpoint activities. The vendor said its new solution also enables compliance, IT, information management and legal teams to gain visibility and access verified information while detecting and preventing corporate and regulatory risks in real time.

“We understand today’s organisations are overwhelmed with growing volumes of data that are incredibly difficult to manage. For compliance and legal staff, that means having to manually search and review petabytes of messages or files from regulatory compliance, supervisory, or investigation review queues,” said Proofpoint senior vice-president and general manager of compliance, Kevin Leusing. “The new Intelligent Compliance Platform vastly improves the detection of non-compliant communications and content while quickly pinpointing supervised insider risks.”

The Intelligent Compliance Platform is underpinned by Proofpoint Capture for modernising data collection; Proofpoint Patrol, covering compliance and reputation protection for social media account monitoring and reporting; Proofpoint Track for data stream capture visibility; and Proofpoint Discover, for e-discovery and case management. There is also Proofpoint Archive for cloud-based storage management; Proofpoint Supervision tools; and Proofpoint Automate, machine learning for monitoring the security and compliance stack.

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