CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 16 August 2018

Dynamic Yield raises $32 million

Personalisation software vendor, Dynamic Yield, has scooped up $US32 million in Series D funding led by Viola Growth, with participation from Union Tech Ventures.

The funding aims to enable Dynamic Yield to power individualised experiences beyond Web, across kiosks, call centres, POS systems, IoT devices and more. This round brings the company’s total funding to $77 million.  

The latest investment will help to accelerate product innovation in the form of a set of personalisation APIs, enabling businesses to personalise every digital channel and customer touchpoint at scale. In addition, the round will fuel the expansion of a partner network, doubling down on integrations similar to that of Salesforce Commerce and Marketing Clouds, which allows mutual clients to sync and personalise all points along the customer journey.

Yotpo acquires Swell Rewards

Yotpo has made its first acquisition: Swell Rewards, a Boston-based provider of incentive marketing solutions for eCommerce and omnichannel brands.

The move expands Yotpo’s suite of commerce marketing technology solutions. Brands will be able to manage reviews, visual marketing, consumer insights, rewards and referrals from a single platform designed to meet their customer content, advocacy, engagement, and retention needs.

Yotpo and Swell have a pre-existing integration that enables commerce brands to reward customers for submitting and sharing user-generated content. The acquisition aims enhance those capabilities and set the stage for new solutions that drive business growth.

Yotpo’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) engine will be extended to optimise Swell’s existing product line and drive future innovation.

Dun & Bradstreet to be acquired by Investor Group

Dun & Bradstreet has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by an investor group led by CC Capital, Cannae Holdings and funds affiliated with Thomas H. Lee Partners, along with other investors.

Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by Dun & Bradstreet’s Board of Directors, Dun & Bradstreet shareholders will receive US$145 in cash for each share of common stock they own, in a transaction valued at $6.9 billion including the assumption of $1.5 billion of Dun & Bradstreet’s net debt and net pension obligations.

The purchase price represents a premium of approximately 30 per cent over Dun & Bradstreet’s closing share price of $111.63 on 12 February 2018, the last day of trading prior to Dun & Bradstreet’s announcement of a strategic review.

The transaction is expected to close within six months, subject to Dun & Bradstreet shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other customary closing conditions. The Dun & Bradstreet Board is unanimously recommending that shareholders vote to adopt the merger agreement at an upcoming special meeting of the shareholders. Dun & Bradstreet will then become a privately held company.

Sigstr introduces Sigstr Pulse

Sigstr has debuted its new relationship marketing platform, Sigstr Pulse. The platform uses artificial intelligence to map the collective networks of all employees in a company, and aims to put the power of their relationships at marketer’s fingertips.

Sigstr Pulse claims to allow marketers to monitor sales’ engagement with marketing leads, review which accounts have growing relationships and measure how tactics are assisting sales teams in garnering new relationships at key accounts.

By tracking and scoring the strength of relationships through analysis of employee email, calendar patterns and CRM data, business leaders can gain valuable and scalable insight into how their marketing and sales efforts are performing at the contact, account, and geographic level.

Sigstr said individuals should find it easier to identify and request warm introductions from trusted peers through a global search tool. Additional upcoming integrations with CRMs, marketing automation platforms and account-based marketing platforms like Terminus, will allow marketers to target specific audiences and analyse how business relationships flourish.

Blippar launches indoor visual positioning system

Blippar has launched its new indoor visual positioning system. By pairing the accuracy of indoor visual positioning using computer vision with the interactivity of augmented reality (AR), Blippar aims to create a new system that enables any indoor environment to be turned into a detailed and immersive AR experience.

One of the system’s core applications is indoor wayfinding. The technology aims to enable users to navigate indoor environments by providing directions and information directly through their camera in AR. This has the potential to be applied to large complexes, such as airports, shopping malls, stadiums and supermarkets, in a cost-effective manner.

The other core application is tying persistent AR experiences to a specific physical location, which will be presented to any user every time they visit that exact location.

Meltwater opens up data science platform 

Meltwater is opening up its AI platform, Fairhair.ai, to give a wider array of developers and data scientists the tools to improve data accessibility and actionability.

The platform allows users to connect and organise internal and external data by a knowledge graph, as well as access pre-trained, configurable AI models, plus create real-time insights to make forward-looking, data-driven decisions.

Originally developed to power Meltwater’s media intelligence and social analytics products, Fairhair.ai aims to make it easier for businesses to gain a real-time pulse on everything from market research to risk management.

Fairhair.ai gives developers the tools to leverage the platform’s library of pre-trained AI models or train their own models to create advanced analytics fuelled by the corpus of outside data. This data is continuously mined by Meltwater’s privacy-by-design knowledge graph for relations and facts about the entities, such as acquisitions and product launches.

Google Analytics brings in new Signals

Google Analytics has started beta testing a new feature called Google Signals, which offers cross-device reporting and remarketing capabilities.

Users who choose to activate Google Signals can take advantage of new advertising features being enhanced to better understand customers across devices.

Google Signals upgrades existing advertising features to enable: remarketing with Google Analytics; advertising reporting features; demographics and interests reports; and cross-device reports (in beta).

Intercom launches new chatbot tech

Intercom has launched new chatbot tech designed to accelerate sales. It aims to help businesses create their own custom bots, without code, to help them convert more website visitors into customers, beyond the limits of human-scale.

This new technology, Custom Bots, brings messengers, messenger apps, and bots together for the first time to unlock new levels of automation for businesses looking to scale. Businesses can now develop and connect customised bots with the 100+ workflow apps available on the Intercom App Store including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and more.

Apps enable sales teams to end every bot conversation with an actionable, personalised next step. 

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