CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 24 October 2019

Roku to acquire ad tech platform dataxu

Streaming outfit Roku is outlaying US$150 million to acquire dataxu, a demand side platform (DSP) enabling marketers to plan and buy video ad campaigns. 

dataxu provides marketers with an automated bidding and self-serve software solution to manage ad campaigns programmatically across digital platforms. Dataxu utilises advanced TV and OTT media planning tools, a proprietary device graph, and data science to help marketers optimize for business outcomes across TV, OTT, desktop and mobile.

The company said the deal will build out Roku’s streaming advertising platform and help provide a single, data-driven platform to plan, buy and optimise video ads across TV and streaming providers.

“TV advertising is shifting toward OTT and a data-driven model focused on business outcomes for brands,” said Roku chief executive, Anthony Wood. “The acquisition of dataxu will accelerate our ad platform while also helping our content partners monetise their inventory even more effectively.”

Qualtrics expands its Qualtrics Developer Platform 

The Qualtrics Developer Platform (QDP) has extended its reach into 10 additional categories and added new partners to its existing categories.

The platform enables organisations to embed Qualtrics into their existing software ecosystems, automate key business processes and bring experience data from other listening posts into Qualtrics.

QDP partners provide organisations with capabilities to listen, understand and take action on experience data at every touchpoint. The online reputation management and social listening tools have been expanded so customers can also identify signals from across the Web. Qualtrics is launching a new category of its customer success platform with Totango, a leader in the enterprise customer success space.

Qualtrics is also launching a new category of user research with UserTesting, the leader in the user research space. The suite of new experience management (XM) extensions include brand XM, chat and communication, commerce, community, customer journey mapping, digital experience, human experience management, incentive and referral management, issue and project management, learning management, and video analytics.

Validity introduces new email deliverability features

CRM data management outfit, Validity, has added several new features to the Return Path platform in its Validity for Email solution.

Deliverability reporting can track improvements in inbox placement and gain more extensive coverage of B2B email campaigns. It can improve optimisation for Gmail and G-Suite inboxes, create automated deliverability reporting and extend Return Path’s capabilities for B2B email campaigns.

The new Return Path platform, meanwhile, includes updates to its AI-powered Gmail tool SmartSeeds, which provides access to engagement-based placement data. Validity has also added enhanced business address filtering to its growing CoreSeed list offering from Return Path, providing B2B marketers with more insight into third-party filtering companies used with native hosted mailbox filtering. In addition, there is a new automated deliverability report with clients’ previous month’s data.

Contentsquare updates experience analytics platform

The latest major new release of Contentsquare now gives brands the ability to surface and quantify revenue-generating recommendations for experience improvements using artificial intelligence (AI).

Recommendations can be used to troubleshoot issues or innovate new ways to improve the experience; for example, teams can quickly understand the impact of changes to a web site or mobile app by comparing side-by-side the visitor experience over time or across split test versions.

It provides quantified alerts and aligns the brand around a single version of the truth with regards to digital customer behavior, providing intuitive visualisations of macro behavior and session replays for seeing behaviour at the individual session level. 

Braze adds personalisation tools in suite of new products

New product updates from customer engagement platform Braze are designed to help marketing and growth teams create more relevant, memorable consumer experiences.

The updates include new channel expansion, deeper support for real-time data and new personalisation tools, all designed so brands can create lasting, meaningful relationships with their consumers.

Braze's platform is channel-agnostic, eliminating channel silos, and with the addition of AMP for email, content cards, SMS and Roku, marketers can orchestrate more sophisticated cross-channel campaigns, to build connections between consumers and brands.

OpenText debuts Core Experience Insights 

OpenText, which specialises in enterprise information management, has expanded its customer journey mapping offering with Core Experience Insights.

The SaaS application maps website interactions through to email engagement, social media content and call centre performance. Built on OpenText OT2, which tracks data from diverse sources, it provides current and historical visualisations across channels throughout the customer lifecycle. It can also integrate data from other systems such as customer communication management, web content management and call centre management. With the Voice of Customer application, OpenText Explore, it can also provide a 360-degree view that includes sentiment analysis of customer feedback collected across all channels.

Core Experience Insights uses AI and analytics to reveal campaigns and content that are working best, elevating performance issues early to allow for calibration and correction. Marketers can intelligently optimise customer journeys to improve customer experience and revenue generation.

FocusVision Decipher survey platform taps AI

FocusVision’s survey platform, Decipher, has been renewed with new innovations leveraging machine learning (ML), automation and integration.

The vendor claims brands can now significantly streamline the survey creation and launch process to access insights faster and at a lower cost. The new updates include an integrated Microsoft Word Importer that uses ML to automatically detect question types and answer options and translate them into an online survey in seconds. It also includes the launch of Sample Marketplace, an integrated, automated solution that connects businesses with a survey sample at a reduced cost.

Lastly, the update adds direct integration with Video Insights, FocusVision's secure video management solution, enabling easier analysis of open-ended video questions within any survey created on Decipher.

Bluecore builds out its offering with ecommerce product Bluecore Site 

Retail marketing technology provider, Bluecore, has announced Bluecore Site, a new tool enabling online retailers to personalise email capture campaigns and synchronise product recommendations and offers across emails and ecommerce sites.

The offering features mirrored product recommendations, which show shoppers similar personalised product recommendations when they click through a retailer’s email to its site. Email capture campaigns can be personalised to each individual with an offer predicted to be most appealing in return for providing their email address. Bluecore Site also works to ensure offers are consistent across email and website. 

It also enables personalised on-site product recommendations relevant to what people have shopped for previously or are predicted to be interested in next, based on individual behaviour onsite over one or multiple sessions, in addition to their known Bluecore affinities. It can also issue personalised exit messages as shoppers leave a retailer’s site based on known behaviours, affinities and buying patterns.

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