CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 19 March 2020

Banzai completes US$7 million funding round

US software-as-a-service firm, Banzai, has completed a US$7 million funding round, led by DNX Ventures, an early-stage VC firm focusing on B2B startups.

The latest investment round also included Vulcan Capital, the multi-billion-dollar investment arm of Vulcan. 

The Series A investment will be used to expand Banzai’s product and service offerings in the event marketing automation category. Using Banzai’s end-to-end event marketing automation solution, Banzai customers have generated over 30,000 event and conference registrations around the world. In 2019, Banzai doubled its topline revenue, supported 1400 unique customer events, and grew its team by 200 percent.

Criteo is being investigated by France’s data watchdog

French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, is investigating adtech giant, Criteo, after a complaint was filed by privacy rights campaign group Privacy International. 

Privacy International has been pushing for European data protection agencies to investigate a number of adtech outfits and others involved in programmatic advertising for a year. It has said the adtech ecosystem is based on vast privacy infringements, exploiting people’s data on a daily basis.

"Whether it’s through deceptive consent banners or by infesting mental health websites, these companies enable a surveillance environment where all you moves online are tracked to profile and target you, with little space to contest," the watchdog stated.

You can read more about the investigation and context here.

LiveRamp launches Safe Haven to enable data partnerships

LiveRamp has launched Safe Haven, a new platform to enable secure, permission-enabled data sharing for brands and their partners.

LiveRamp Safe Haven enables omnichannel data and audience collaboration in a neutral, permission-controlled, privacy-first environment to ensure the safety and security of data while delivering matches between partners. 

LiveRamp Safe Haven provides advanced analytics tools to help businesses such as brands, retailers and media networks collaborate with their partners and extract insights from event-level data to inform business decisions and unlock outcome-based measurement capabilities. Example use cases of LiveRamp Safe Haven include the ability to connect a brand with a retailer to refine audience segments with transaction data, or connect a publisher with an advertiser to curate audiences and measure outcomes.

Hootsuite integrates with Oracle Eloqua

Social media management platform, Hootsuite, has announced an integration with Oracle Eloqua, which is part of the marketing technology ecosystem, Oracle Marketing Cloud.

The integration will provide customers the ability to sync social data into their marketing automation platform and unite social and digital campaigns.

The Hootsuite integration with Oracle Eloqua will allow customers to view campaigns and social content together in the Oracle Eloqua calendar, and create new social content directly in Oracle Eloqua to be published through Hootsuite. The integration also brings the interactions customers have with brands’ social profiles into Oracle Eloqua, providing them with a more complete view of the customer journey.

Zoho launches collaboration platform Remotely

Zoho has launched Remotely, a suite of cloud applications to help communicate and collaborate with teams, and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic the company is making Zoho Remotely available free of charge.

The 11 apps in Remotely will be available for free until 1 July and Zoho said it will extend the offer if necessary. Zoho is making the full edition available, not the freemium version.

EZ Texting announces text-to-landline service

SMS marketing platform, EZ Texting, has launched a text-to-landline service and iOS mobile application for businesses to send and receive personalised messages from landlines and mobile devices.

New services include direct two-way business text messaging, which features an online self-service sign-up process to convert existing business phone numbers to send and receive text messages. Additionally, the newly launched iOS app enables customers to communicate in real-time and has real-time push notifications when text messages are received, so businesses are alerted every time there is a new message.

Adobe integrates further with Marketo

Adobe has announced its second significant integration post-Marketo acquisition, confirming Marketo Engage users will now be able to access Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets directly through their platform.

The integration with the digital assets platform is available to those on version 6.5 or higher using both platforms.In a comment to CMSWire, Marketo director of product marketing, Brian Glover, described the recent release of the Adobe DAM with Marketo one of the “key integrations customers have been asking for.”

VDX.tv expanding into international markets

After its recent US launch, digital advertising outfit, Exponential Interactive, is rolling out its new video-driven business division, VDX.tv, in international markets. VDX.tv allows brands to serve tailormade video-driven experiences across screens including connected TV (CTV) and over the top (OTT).

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