CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 1 March 2018

AdRoll relaunches brand 3 months after Aussie staff cull

AdRoll has kickstarted a brand refresh initially in EMEA, North America and APAC in February before rolling out to other markets, aimed at helping the company grow revenue and challenge established brands.

The adtech vendor's new brand play comes three months after the company axed the majority of its local workforce as part of streamlining of global operations that also saw executive leadership shift to Dublin. The changes followed the appointment of Toby Gabriner as CEO. At the time, the vendor also flagged significant "transformational" plans for 2018.

Under the newly announced rebrand, AdRoll is introducing a guided campaign setup for small businesses, improved cross-channel campaign reporting, an expanded native offering, and a self-serve attribution dashboard. The company claims this will make it easier for AdRoll customers to grow their business via the platform.

In addition, the company has restructured operations overseas, introducing a dedicated B2B division, called RollWorks., where its account-based marketing offering will sit. The changes also see Gabriner promoted to group CEO, and former North American president, Scott Gifis, become group president.

“Digital has never been more vital to the success of any business strategy, but it has also never been more complicated," Gifis said.

"Since 2007, AdRoll has been committed to making effective digital marketing, however complex, simple for marketers and business owners so they can attract, convert, and engage more customers. The next generation of solutions reinforces our mission is to help ambitious businesses grow their business no matter their resources, budget, or marketing expertise.”

Genesys acquires Altocloud, bolsters its AI and journey analytics

Genesys has completed the acquisition of Altocloud, a cloud-based customer journey analytics provider. 

The acquisition aims to strengthen Genesys' capability in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help organisations deliver responsive, predictive, and fully-contextual experience throughout all stages of the customer journey in real time across channels.

This is achieved through AI and machine learning, which use pre-defined personas and past behaviour analysis to automatically predict consumer outcomes and give context to the customer’s journey. As a result, organisations can deliver the next-best action by the right employee for improved success rates.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Altocloud is based in Ireland with a small office in the US.

3radical completes funding round

3radical, developer of the Voco mobile gamification platform, has completed a £3 million funding round.

The funding round was supported by a range of private investors from the UK and will be used to drive continuing growth into existing and new markets.

To support this next stage of growth, new hires have also been announced, including David Newberry as CMO, Rachel Swann as European commercial director, and Samantha Baker is leading the customer success team.

Voco has also seen a number of enhancements in the last six months, including the inclusion of new interactivity elements and additional social channels such as Instagram. It has also been designed to scale-up quickly.

Gemba launches Turnstile

Gemba has unveiled a new platform called Turnstile, which aims to change the approach to valuing sponsorships by providing both buyers and sellers with the ability to recognise the physical assets as well as the intellectual property of sponsorships.

Turnstile has been more than two years in development, with Gemba carrying out testing with leading international brands and rights holders, including Formula 1, before bringing the new platform to market.

“The global sponsorship industry is a USD$62 billion market, yet there has never been an effective valuation approach to help buyers and sellers assess the appropriate price for a sponsorship," Rob Mills, CEO and director of Gemba, said. "For decades, media equivalency metrics have provided valuations to the market that bear no connection to the actual contract prices of sport and entertainment assets. Furthermore, these sorts of metrics only seek to measure the logo exposure of an asset, they do not holistically capture the true value of sponsorship.”

Turnstile aims to provide a methodology that moves beyond exposure measurement and investigates the intellectual property value of sponsorship assets. Turnstile hopes to offer this by providing both buyers and sellers with a holistic valuation approach that values sponsorships across three core components: benefits, exposure, and IP.

Magento Commerce gives merchants direct access to Amazon

Magento Commerce has added sales channel capabilities to its platforms so merchants can manage inventory on Amazon directly from the channel. 

Since the launch of Amazon Australia, shopping traffic has risen by 90 per cent to over 14 million visitors. In a recent Magento study, 92 per cent of merchants surveyed said they expect to grow their Amazon sales channel revenue over the next 12 months.

Features of the Magento sales channel capability include the ability to leverage Amazon’s catalogue data for storefront enhancements such as advanced search, filtered navigation and promotional rules; automatically match products and list them across Amazon’s North American, APAC and European marketplaces; utilise marketing tools to manage listings across marketplaces and increase sales by enhancing a listing’s urgency; take advantage of centralised order management to synchronise order status, tracking information, customer data, and cancellations; and access reporting on competitor pricing.

Google launches Speed Scorecard, Impact Calculator and Flutter

Google has launched Speed Scorecard, Impact Calculator and Flutter to support and enhance mobile website development.

The Speed Scorecard shows the speeds of thousands of sites from 12 countries across the globe and allows comparisons between a site's mobile speed with that of other companies’. It's powered by Chrome User Experience Report, a database of real-user latency data for how Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.

Impact Calculator estimates the revenue impact that could then result from improving the speed of a mobile site.

Google also launched Flutter, the company’s open-source mobile UI framework to assist developers to build native interfaces for Android and iOS. The library is designed to combine the performance and platform integrations of native mobile with the rapid development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits.

YouTube rolls out chat replay and automatic captions

YouTube has introduce more ways to watch live videos and interact with communities in real time. YouTube is starting to roll out chat replay, so the conversation can be followed even after a live stream is over. Live chat replays will show up alongside the video as it appeared live.

YouTube is also bringing English automatic captions to live streams. When professionally provided captions aren’t available, YouTube’s live automatic captions provide creators with a way to make live streams accessible to more people. Using live automatic speech recognition (LASR) technology, captions with error rates and latency approaching industry standards will be available.

Ogury launches Active Insights

Ogury has taken the wrappers off Active Insights, an app ecosystem intelligence solution for app publishers.

Active Insights is powered by Ogury's first-party data, and claims to leverage real user behaviour to provide true ownership and engagement metrics to app publishers. The platform claims to allow publishers to explore the entirety of the app ecosystem so they can identify competitors, and monitor their performance with like-for-like comparison of their own key metrics. It also aims to assist in audience engagement and retention by providing an understanding of the churn factors that lead users to delete, download, or re-download apps.

Publishers can also 'activate' these insights by building and exporting audience segments based on their app usage, with the ability to action them within their existing marketing and CRM tools.

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