CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 4 February 2021

Genesys and Limitless launch new digital experience for consumers

Genesys, which specialises in cloud customer experience and contact centre solutions, has partnered with Limitless, a pioneer in Gig customer experience (GigCX).

Genesys and Limitless are aiming to help businesses extend their contact centre teams using a gig workforce comprising brand experts that can provide consumers anywhere in the world with new levels of trusted support. End-customers will benefit from reliable answers to their questions from users of products and services via their preferred digital channels, such as text and chat.

By bringing together Genesys Cloud with the Limitless GigCX platform, the plan is to give brands a more connected, contextual experience across the customer journey. Genesys orchestrates this integration by leveraging AI capabilities, which predict and blend the resources necessary to resolve a customer's inquiry, whether a Limitless Expert, contact centre agent or even a bot. Genesys AI also works in the background to ensure customers have a seamless hand-off between the Limitless expert and contact centre.

Demand Science acquires Tidings

Demand Science, a global buyer intelligence platform with an integrated B2B solution suite, has announced the acquisition of Tidings, an on-demand automated newsletter creation SaaS platform.

The deal is about extending the company’s sales enablement and sales intelligence solution suite. Demand Science said integrating its data and artificial intelligence roadmap with Tidings into its platform will deliver a simple-to-use tool that adds immediate value for Demand Science’s customers. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

Tidings' selling pitch is to help reduce the average time to create and send email newsletters from hours to less than 10 minutes through its no-code tools; works across all major email service providers, uniquely integrates with social channels and leverages its content delivery engine for sales and marketing professionals; and delivers open rates and click rates higher than industry averages.

Verint completes Cognyte spin-off

Customer engagement outfit, Verint, has completed the spin-off of Cognyte Software, marking the start of Verint’s journey as a pure-play customer engagement vendor.

Cognyte began regular way trading on NASDAQ on 2 February 2021. In connection with the separation, Verint shareholders will receive one share of Cognyte common stock for each share of Verint common stock.

"Verint becoming a pure-play customer engagement company is happening at the exact right time – a time when digital transformation is driving significant change in how brands engage with their customers,"  commented the vendor's CEO, Dan Bodner. "Verint helps organisations break down barriers and eliminate the constraints of organizational and data silos to achieve boundless customer engagement. With our open cloud platform, significant domain expertise and broad partner ecosystem, we are well positioned to help brands build enduring customer relationships."

The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform, built on a native cloud architecture with an open design, aims to help brands connect work, experiences and data across their organisation.

TVSquared launches ADvantage XP

TVSquared has launched ADvantage XP, the premier tier of its ADvantage analytics platform, built to provide scalable, uniform measurement across channels, platforms, devices and identity partners.

With independent attribution and direct relationships with advertisers, DSPs, publishers, agencies and MVPDs, ADvantage XP measures the effectiveness of TV advertising through a scalable platform for linear, addressable and OTT/CTV measurement and outcomes.
 
ADvantage XP enables cross-channel tracking and analysis of TV ads served across linear and digital channels, including all traditional and programmatic inventory; cross-platform measurement across publisher platforms to quantify unique reach, cross-screen tracking and viewing measurement across all screens, from smart TVs to laptops and mobile devices.

Magnite debuts Unified Decisioning

Ad platform, Magnite, has launched the open beta of Unified Decisioning, a solution that enables CTV and OTT publishers to maximise yield by removing the need to manage direct sold and programmatic demand channels independently and allowing them to compete side by side.

Unified Decisioning gives publishers the tools and controls to define when and how direct sold and programmatic demand should compete. The solution works alongside all major ad servers to ensure that the optimal ad set is chosen to consider both direct and programmatic deal priority and yield while ensuring publishers’ business rules, including frequency capping and competitive separation, are enforced. Early adopters of the platform include Seven West Media.

“We’ve designed and built Unified Decisioning to address the barriers between unifying direct sold and programmatic demand with the specific needs of CTV publishers in mind,” said Magnite vice-president of video product management, Paige Bilins. “Publishers are eager to tap into the efficiencies that programmatic provides without relinquishing the control they are used to when selling directly to buyers. Unified Decisioning enables them to do both and we’re excited to bring these capabilities to leading CTV publishers.”

Dynamic Yield expands multilingual support for personalisation

Experience optimisation platform, Dynamic Yield, has expanded its multilingual support with the launch of Multilanguage Campaigns, allowing global brands to seamlessly tailor experiences according to different site languages.

This feature comes in addition to the company’s support of multiple currencies for conversion events as well as the ability to render localised product recommendations based on page context and product feed values.

Instead of duplicating entire campaigns and maintaining multiple versions, brands can now use Dynamic Yield’s Multilanguage Campaigns feature to localise content and manage translations for each element of a variation or template directly within the campaign according to each desired locale. This can be done without writing additional JavaScript code, which is another major drawback to creating numerous campaigns of similar likeness as it can have a detrimental impact on page load speed and requires greater development resources to handle translations for every page locale. 

SparkPost raises US$180 million

SparkPost, which specialises in email delivery, optimisation and analytics, has raised US$180 million from LLR Partners, NewSpring Capital and PNC Bank.

SparkPost had previously raised about US$94 million. With its fresh US$180 million, the company plans to build on its existing customer base that includes Zillow, Adobe, Pinterest, Twitter, the New York Times, Booking.com, Rakuten, and Zynga

SparkPost provides deep insights into email campaigns, including delivery rate and engagement, while serving up real-time data and analytics to monitor bounce rates, spam traps and ISP responses to determine whether emails are arriving at their intended destination.

Hootsuite ups the ante on content discovery

Social media management platform, Hootsuite, has taken the wrappers of a new integration aimed at helping brands discover and distribute content more seamlessly.  

The new Curate by UpContent integration is being pitched as an active content discovery technology, allowing users to identify, review, approve and distribute articles on their social channels through the Hootsuite dashboard. The tool automatically surfaces articles on relevant topics via its discovery engine. It’s being supported by a compliance layer by cybersecurity vendor, Proofpoint, which Hootsuite first began integrating with in 2019.    

Hootsuite VP of corporate marketing, Henk Campher, said the tool suits small-to-medium size businesses through to large enterprise organisations.  

“The Proofpoint layer is so unique because it allows those within highly regulated industries to find and curate content without the risk,” added UpContent founder and CEO, Scott Rogerson. “With thought leadership leading the next phase of digital transformation for many brands and businesses, this three-pronged approach to content curation, social media management, and compliance is an absolute must for brands and the individuals that represent them.”   

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