CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 30 April 2020

Templafy completes US$25 million Series C round

Enterprise document creation and automation outfit, Templafy, has closed a US$25 million Series C funding round led by global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners.

The latest round included participation from Dawn Capital, Seed Capital and Damgaard Company, bringing the total external capital raised to almost US$70 million The fund injection will be used to accelerate its international growth.

Founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2014, Templafy's team leveraged more than 15 years of experience in template management and document automation to develop an enterprise cloud service solution.

Aprimo releases updates to agile marketing platform

Aprimo, a provider of digital asset management and work management software, has released new features to its agile marketing platform. 

The updates include a drag-and-drop workflow designer updated with tools to create artificial intelligence (AI)-powered workflow templates. A new single view shows only the most relevant information. A work request portal provides a single place to route all requests with a self-service form for new projects. An Agile board lets users visualise work, including what’s in progress, what’s done, and what’s still to come.

Finally, a Sprint view lists all current tasks organised by sprints and all tasks not yet assigned to a specific sprint.

MediaMath partners with TVSquared

TV attribution outfit, TVSquared, has partnered with MediaMath for connected TV (CTV) attribution, enabling advertisers to attribute actions directly to programmatic CTV campaigns delivered across screens, from smart TVs to digital devices.

The new partnership is aimed at providing accountability to targeted TV investments, while leveraging real-time analytics to track, measure and optimise the performance of programmatic video ads served via CTV. 

CTV performance analytics tie TV spots and campaigns directly to business outcomes, tracking brand-specific KPIs, including sales, website visits, app engagement, registrations. TVSquared’s always-on platform demonstrates ROI and delivers reach, frequency and recency analytics along with impressions and responses by geography.

Medallia acquires Voci Technologies

Experience management platform, Medallia, is set to acquire Voci Technologies,  the real-time speech to text platform. 

The acquisition will combine Voci’s real-time speech to text capabilities with Medallia’s powerful experience management platform to deliver a rich, single view of the customer. Voci’s artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning capabilities, backed by speech scientists, generates sophisticated language models for accurate transcription of calls into highly accurate insights, such as emotion, gender, sentiment and voice biometric identity.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

TapClicks acquires AdStage

Also on the acquisition path is marketing analytics platform, TapClicks, which purchased AdStage, a campaign optimisation outfit.

Known for its cross-channel analytics and optimisation platform, AdStage will be integrated into TapClicks’ family of brands, which includes Raven Tools, iSpionage, Megalytic and StatX, to expand the marketing intelligence capabilities available to TapClicks’ customers.

TapClicks aims to help marketers from agencies, brands, franchises, media companies and HIPAA-covered entities automate data management and operations. Its unified marketing platform, the TapClicks Marketing Operations Platform, delivers unique data aggregation and ingestion capabilities from more than 4600 sources and includes fully automated solutions for data warehousing, distribution, analytics and reporting.

Again, financial terms were not disclosed.

etailz launches self-service bid optimisation software 

Etailz has launched a self-service Amazon cost per click advertising software, AdManager, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the management of Amazon-sponsored product ads to minimise wasted ad spend, increase relevancy and maximise return on investment.

Powered by an expansive data model, AdManager automates four major optimisation processes: Daily bid optimisation, high-converting search term addition, negative keyword audit and daily budget optimisation. Advertisers can tailor AdManager’s bidding strategy to suit their strategic initiatives by either setting a target ACoS and using AdManager’s tried and true optimisations, or create their own custom rulesets to guide the software’s actions. 

In other Amazon-related news, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed service that provides an easy, secure way for customers to create and automate bidirectional data flows between AWS and SaaS applications without writing custom integration code. 

Amazon AppFlow also works with AWS PrivateLink to route data flows through the AWS network instead of over the public internet to provide even stronger data privacy and security. There are no upfront charges or fees to use Amazon AppFlow, and customers only pay for the number of flows they run and the volume of data processed.

Sisense releases new AI capabilities

Business analytics outfit, Sisense, has released new artificial intelligence (AI) natural language capabilities to aid data driven decision making.

The list includes patent-pending Knowledge Graph based on hundreds of billions of past analytics events. Sisense aims to simplify digital transformation and empowers everyone inside and outside an organisation to make data-driven decisions while balancing the needs of end-users and technical teams. 

Sisense Natural Language Query (NLQ) enables non-technical users to explore data and gain deeper insights, even if they are not familiar with the data structure, by just typing a simple question and receiving suggestions and personalised recommendations based on past searches and organisational usage patterns.

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